This started out as an overview of a new desktop bundle and quickly turned into a rant about why gnome shouldn't change your favorite feature..
It’s what, a decade now, and we still don’t have screensavers back, let alone configurable screensavers.
Menu's belong on the app window.
It also encourages a poor menu paradigm (imo) of nested menus. Iconography, ribbons, searchable action bars, and other innovations are more often found on OSes where the choice isn't made for the user.
It seems really silly with how UIs have evolved to use a Mac at work, with half of the menus in the app and a seemingly random other half in a disconnected set of nested menus. That's my experience at least.
Linux desktops are usually "focus follows mouse" (because the scrollwheel is part of the mouse not the keyboard), so in the second screenshot with two apps side by side and the right one in focus, moving the mouse to the menu will result in the active application and menu changing.
Focus follows mouse is an extremely useful feature which allows you to move focus without changing the relative arrangement of windows to each other (whereas Alt+Tab or relatives would bring the selected window to the front).
Additionally, a top-level menu bar is always there and requires a horizontal layout (I think?). In a window, each application can decide to hide the menu bar at will with only a vertical panel being visible at all time in all apps.
https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Whiteboards/AppMenuMigration
I can see why the hamburger menu works for a constrained space (such as a smartphone), but for a laptop or desktop, it is absolutely terrible: place for less menu items, another layer of navigation (since you cannot cram everything in one menu), and in the GNOME case typically no visible keyboard shortcuts.
The Xerox Star had hamburger menus, but Apple Lisa and the Macintosh moved away from hamburger menus because regular menus had better discoverability and required less clicking accuracy [1]. We are moving backwards when it comes to user interfaces. Luckily, it seems that this disease hasn't really spread to KDE or macOS yet.
Unfortunately, in GNOME, the application menu was already pretty useless, because it had many items already moved to the hamburger menu or simply removed.
[1] https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-u...
It's amazing how even the mockups on that page are obviously for phones or tablets.
On the one hand, I while I don't use it anymore, I do wish desktops were more of a first-class citizen for Gnome, since it's the default environment on many distributions.
On the other hand though, I really wish designers involved in Linux FOSS projects would stop shoving designs made with smartphones in mind on the desktop. Running Gnome on a 27" screen -- and Gnome applications -- is a really confusing (and, at times, outright hilarious) experience, it's like I'm moving iPads around on my screen. Maybe this is a step in the right direction.