May be “BaBar” is a compromize?
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BaBar looks like a solid option for this. Either that or use Gnome Classic until they update Dash to Dock.
You are right, GNOME developers hate ordinary users, that’s why they are fighting against extensions and always changing API in every release to break them. You’ve opened my eyes. I switched to Cinnamon. Staying on GNOME is masochism.
Desktop environment that needs to be supplemented with extensions for full-fledged work is defective desktop environment.
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What do you mean? Bare Gnome without any extensions works perfectly for full-fledged work! 
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You are right, but my masochistic streak demands to continue with Gnome DE…
(KDE demands too much masochistic suffering). 
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Bare Gnome without any extensions - is this not like bare Microsoft Windofs without any usable apps??
Seems You are not a “Microsoft Fan Boy” - let us create a new swear word in manjaro?? 
(please mark satire as such - germans do not have receptors ( sensors) for british humor)
Let us close with: It’s all a matter of taste
Add extension: “No overview on startup” if you like!
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It works perfectly fine without extensions. This insistance on using extensions is like swimming against the current - Gnome wasn’t designed to be used with extensions, using them will just increase the memory footprint and decrease stability. Should developers who have a certain vision compromize their integrity/ideas and cater to every user who complains? I find it mindboggling that users who complain about Gnome don’t just switch to a different DE… it’s like forcing yourself to eat a food you don’t like and complaining about it.
I’ve used and enjoyed Windows, Mac OS, Linux etc, so I don’t consider myself to be a fanboy. Do you have to be a fan boy to like using Gnome without extensions? That’s nonsense, it’s a matter of elegant and efficient design. I wonder how many of the users that “need” extensions have tried using bare Gnome for a month or so?
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It was, actually. That was one of the main points about the 3.0 release notes:
Bolding mine.
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Using i3 or dwm might be more comfortable, than GNOME without extensions.
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Interesting. Was De Icaza still working on GNOME at this point? People say various things about him since he stopped working on GNOME and went to Microsoft, but I am grateful for the work he has done for the open-source community at large.
Were extensions ever intended for the end-user? The fact that it isn’t in the core settings (and never has been to my knowledge) makes me question that. I see extensions as more of a prototyping/design tool to quickly test out new features - I may be wrong.
I guess one of the reasons I stopped using extensions was that you are largely on your own if something breaks. You either have to:
a.) Wait for the developer to fix it.
b.) Find an alternative if it has been abandoned
c.) Fix it yourself
I am not a developer myself, so I can’t comment on how much work it would be for the GNOME team to ensure GTK/gnome-shell maintains backwards compatibility with extensions written for older versions of GNOME - especially at this point in GNOME’s lifecycle. I am not against extensions as an idea, but I don’t really like the idea that it isn’t part of core GNOME and can stop working after an update. Perhaps a better approach to something like DTD would be something more independent such as Docky? I don’t really know.
I don’t blame developers for this as many of the paid developers have other priorities that don’t include maintaining extension compatibility - otherwise these features would be part of core GNOME and not an extentsion I suspect. My best guess is that some of their decisions are based on design choice and some of it is based on what they have the resources to develop and/or not to mention maintain.
Keep in mind that post is almost 10 years old now, it was made in 2011.
As far as I could tell, yes. The whole idea behind putting them on a website with a browser addon was to make it easy to install and manage, and using gnome tweak tool to edit their preferences for the users who wanted to tweak the defaults. So yes, I believe it was for the end user to make it easier to control the work flow, but that’s just my guess.
Yeah, the biggest issue I have with the extension-system is actually about abandoned extensions. There are a lot of extensions who haven’t been updated in years, and there’s no telling beforehand which will break and which will need updating. It’s just a mess imo.
However! this article from september has me hopeful that things will improve, even if only a little bit!
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More cooperation with GNOME for testing extensions could indeed be useful. Seeing is believing though, I will wait and see what happens. Until that time I consider extensions to be a broken/half-baked feature as far as end-users are concerned; for now it seems to be best suited for prototyping.
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Man I finally made a post that’s straight fire! woohoo!
Great discussion everyone! =)
–Asif
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For what it’s worth, I upgraded my Anarchy install today and Dash to Dock works fine with Gnome 40. ArcMenu, mpris indicator button, and openweather are working as well.
It won’t work with Gnome Shell 40. Arch pushed Gnome 40 and some related Gnome 40 packages, but not Gnome Shell 40. This is a important difference. If you want to try Gnome Shell 40, you need to enable the staging repository.
https://archlinux.org/packages/?sort=&q=gnome-shell&maintainer=&flagged=
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I tested Fedora 34 Beta and git pulled DtD with the wip pending pull request for gnome 40… Basic functionality works, but I wouldn’t recommend using it as a daily driver.
I see. I misunderstood the whole issue. Anyway, I’ll deal with it when Gnome Shell 40 is pushed.
I’m using Gnome 40 in Manjaro unstable branch for more than 1 week as my daily driver and so far so good (I do not use extensions).
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That’s what I have been doing in a VM and it works well so far. I actually tried installing on a partition, but something crashed, and haven’t had the time to revisit.