If you're a power-user that likes having many toolbars, don't use gnome, there are other amazing DEs made for you
The main strength of the Linux desktop is its diversity
The problem is that Gnome has infected GTK to the point that it's really hard to avoid all their (imo) poor design choices (like lack of menu bars, hidden scrollbars, dialog dismiss buttons on top right) if you're using a GTK based DE like XFCE.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GTK/comments/xdfgjr/api_changes_in_...
For me personally Gnome UI and UX is cleaner and simpler than MacOS. At the same time there are awesome community extensions that can fine tune Gnome behavior in ways MacOS users can only dream about.
I have used Gnome 2 before and while I was a bit skeptical at the launch of Gnome 3, I have embraced their approach and Gnome is currently my favorite DE by far.
I really wanted to like KDE because they implemented some technical features (fractional scaling, VRR, tearing support) years before Gnome, but it's too bloated and outdated for my liking. I rather live without some of those Wayland features that KDE support than loose the clean and less distracting looks and workflow of Gnome.
Gnome made a hard decision by going this direction and lost some users along the way, but I think that in the long term it has been worth it and has pushed Linux desktop further.
On my Arch development machine I have about 30 Gnome extensions that play nicely together.
I have also developed extensions on Gnome and I can certainly do much more extending than MacOS allows. Developer documentation for Gnome is bad, but if you dig in the code, you can make anything happen and the community is quite helpful if you are stuck and out of ideas.
Workspace navigation, window management between workspaces and on workspaces is a lot nicer and certainly more advanced on Gnome. On Gnome, extensions integrate into the control center directly, while on MacOS everything is a separate paid app that has different UI/UX. And once you have too many of those helper apps in the top bar on MacOS, they disappear between the notch on newer Macbooks. You simply can not access them anymore, they are permanently hidden until you close other apps to make space, which is just ridiculous.
And try extending the top menu or dock on MacOS. It is not possible in a nice way. I have tried and paid for many tools on MacOS and it still is bad. You simply have to accept the defaults if you want to have a good time. And those defaults are counter productive for me personally.
Nope. Just like shell you can inject javascript into anything on mac. Every app is scriptable by AppleScript or javascript by default. App developer has the option to make it more scriptable. Mac has a perfect api for that and that is why it works well even with hundreds of extensions.
And No need for helper as in the top bar. They are meant to run as service. ICE can hide those in a smart way anyway. Which is a super cool free app. App boring-notch transforms notch into dynamic island. I never used any paid app in my life on mac. But I do donate.
And nope. Extending dock is super easy with tools like BetterTouchTool even for novice. That is why there are hundreds of dock apps. On a whim I made dock behave like dock-to-dash by injecting only 20 line of code. https://objectstack.github.io/images/Dock-To-Dash-Mac.gif
It will hide/unhide from dock.
Gnome is counter productive not Mac. As I said you need to dive deep. People use Mac when they want to get their works done or Windows to play games. Gnome is just part-time-play-thing. Linux simply doesn’t work on desktop.
Modern one is an unorganised mess full of artifacts.
Just like trees, you can date an app by counting how many toolbars it has
That's what happens when 20 PMs overrule each other and fight for exposure instead of caring for UX