The thing is that the shell provides so little innate functionality and delegates anything more to an ecosystem of random quality, and then subjects those authors to a pretty capricious interface that breaks random extensions every six months generally driving a lot of the authors to throw up their hands and give up.
So the native functionality is solid, though even lower features than Microsoft windows window management, and then have to apply dodgy extensions to get features that other solutions just have as a matter of course.
If I didn’t know any better, I would have assumed that gnome shell was some small demonstrator project to serve as a reference implementation (e.g Weston) rather than intended for serious use. I came over from gnome 2 thinking things went pretty far backwards, but the extensions are going to be stop gaps while they build back up to a balance desktop. But they never seemed to do that.
Ultimately, I landed on Plasma and that’s been pretty good. Have some embedded/kiosk stuff using sway thanks to the very nice scriptable facilities there, but still sticking with kwin as a daily driver for now.
The thing is that the shell provides so little innate functionality and delegates anything more to an ecosystem of random quality, and then subjects those authors to a pretty capricious interface that breaks random extensions every six months generally driving a lot of the authors to throw up their hands and give up.
So the native functionality is solid, though even lower features than Microsoft windows window management, and then have to apply dodgy extensions to get features that other solutions just have as a matter of course.
If I didn’t know any better, I would have assumed that gnome shell was some small demonstrator project to serve as a reference implementation (e.g Weston) rather than intended for serious use. I came over from gnome 2 thinking things went pretty far backwards, but the extensions are going to be stop gaps while they build back up to a balance desktop. But they never seemed to do that.
Ultimately, I landed on Plasma and that’s been pretty good. Have some embedded/kiosk stuff using sway thanks to the very nice scriptable facilities there, but still sticking with kwin as a daily driver for now.