This needing to be a third party extension (which if we're being honest, will probably be broken / abandoned eventually) seems like a damning indictment of Gnome.
Similarly, there is dash-to-dock extension, which emulates a feature from another popular OS. It is also indictment, that Gnome doesn't have macOS-like dock in the core? Is it an indictment of Windows shell, that is doesn't have such feature at all, neither in core nor in extension?
From virtually every other OS for the past 25 years. That is reason enough to support it.
Mac never emulated this windows feature and it never hurt its adoption. If anything, it helped, because it wasn't associated with annoyances that the new users were getting away from.
Btw, I'm also using windows/mac/(fedora,ubuntu,alma) at the same time. Bigger annoyance is changes between different versions of the same system (i.e. windows 10 -> windows 11) than difference between different systems.
I don't understand this statement. They are using multiple OS', are they really struggling to switch between MacOS and Windows that much? If they are, then Gnome is going to be the least of their problems.
There is no desire to cater to Windows users because they move the target, "Oh you might have made this to be like Windows like we asked, but actually this is also not like Windows so I'll never use it anyway."
I personally love Linux, love Gnome, and, when I'm not paid, I only use these platforms. However, it is incredibly difficult to justify spending time on workarounds, and it is emotionally painful to see the Gnome team dig in their heels. I can't blame them for wanting to do things the way they see fit, they are a volunteer organization after all, but seeing them be actively averse to adoption is difficult.
The Linux community has the weirdest gatekeeping. "We're not going to let you do that because it reminds us of proprietary software."
When the Start menu is nothing but advertisements and user data is forcibly uploaded to the cloud, Windows users will look up and shout "save us!" and the Linux community will look down and whisper "no".
Maybe your app sole entry point should not be a systray icon, especially, since users might not have systray at all (intentionally).
You will have similar issue with Android, and how it handles (persistent) notifications, background tasks and activities in foreground.
That said, I personally find vanilla GNOME pretty easy to use. It only took me a day or so to get used to not having things like a taskbar. If you use the hot corner (which is also hated), you can switch to any open app with one mouse click just like with a taskbar.
So either I'm an alien, or people are more adaptable than they give themselves credit for, and will go impressive lengths to not adapt (e.g. making a taskbar for a desktop that's perfectly usable without one).
I've never understood this, and it sometimes seems like a conspiracy. It's a very controversial DE and has gotten a lot of negative reactions for many years now, and it was so bad that different devs made not 1, but 2 forks of it: MATE and Cinnamon, in addition to all the other competing DEs out there (KDE, LXDE, Xfce, etc.). But for some odd reason, all the highest-profile distros push Gnome. If they wanted to get more converts from Windows, or pitch themselves as an OS for office use that Windows users could easily switch to, you'd think they'd push KDE as the first choice, because it's the most similar.
The default gnome dock behaves differently, but is (mostly) usable without this extension, just via different patterns. If you expect to have a desktop that consistently behaves like KdE, you’re probably better off switching to KDE (which is funny given some LDE users rice their desktops to almost look like gnome).
Do you (or anyone else here) know any way to recreate the touchpad desktop switching on KDE? I prefer its capabilities but admire gnome's aesthetics.
I use GNOME only in throwaway VM, but even there - only the extensions available in official repository are used.
There's a small but vocal minority who have been crying about the direction for 13 years, but still want to use it. Must be doing some things right.
Part it is the frustation of seeing it come so close to being a viable replacement for Windows back in the mid-2000s, only to jump the shark and become something we wouldn't use ourselves, let alone recommend to a would-be Windows refugee. (To be clear, I'm not saying it's unusable now - but I was shocked by just how slow and unresponsive the first version of Gnome 3 was.)
Unfortunately Gnome doesn't exist in a vacuum, and decisions made there do impact the rest of us - thanks to Gtk it's getting harder and harder to avoid the ingress of hamburger menus into desktop-oriented software - even developer / technical focussed stuff like a text editor VCD waveform viewer.
Being forced to switch from KDE to Gnome was a very painful transition. Having the Dash to Panel and Dash to Dock extensions was the only thing that made it palatable.
Vanilla Gnome may be fine as a streamlined tablet OS for casual web browsing but it is not suitable to doing real desktop work.