I gave it a fair shot for about a year, using vanilla GNOME with no extensions. While I eventually became somewhat proficient, it’s just not good.
Switching between a few workspaces looks cool, but once you have 10+ programs open, it becomes an unmanageable hell that requires memorizing which workspace each application is in and which hotkey you have each application set to.
How is this better than simply having icons on the taskbar? By the way, the taskbar still exists in GNOME! It’s just empty and seems to take up space at the top for no apparent reason other than displaying the time.
Did I do something wrong? Is it meant for you to only ever have a couple applications open?
I’d love to hear from people that use it and thrive in it.
I must say, I have mixed feelings about it. When Gnome 3 replaced Gnome 2, I just hated it. It was missing features in every aspect, and the ergonomics were… questionable at best. Over time, modern Gnome evolved and since version 42, I think it’s a modern, pretty desktop environment. It is clean and readable on the eyes, looks fancy with all those animations, and there are amazing apps with almost minimalist approach, really useful, nicely integrated into a unified design language. I ran Fedora Silverblue for almost a year now, and it took me about 6 weeks to get used to the modern Gnome workflow. It’s just that different. And for a while, I even began to think that I really like it and that it might be my favourite desktop environment now. But lately… I just start to think that with a simple, traditional DE like XFCE, it would be way easier to manage many open applications and windows, and those fancy animations start to really annoy me. I think I have explored Gnome enough to now think that I prefer the oldschool way. I’ll be on something with XFCE soon.
As much as I love XFCE, it isn’t ready for Wayland.
I just started KDE today for Wayland. It’s not as bad as I remembered it.