I gave it a fair shot for about a year, using vanilla GNOME with no extensions. While I eventually became somewhat proficient, it’s just not good.
Switching between a few workspaces looks cool, but once you have 10+ programs open, it becomes an unmanageable hell that requires memorizing which workspace each application is in and which hotkey you have each application set to.
How is this better than simply having icons on the taskbar? By the way, the taskbar still exists in GNOME! It’s just empty and seems to take up space at the top for no apparent reason other than displaying the time.
Did I do something wrong? Is it meant for you to only ever have a couple applications open?
I’d love to hear from people that use it and thrive in it.
Indeed, I’m trying dash to panel and it doesn’t feel like it fixes quite a few of the issues I was having. I’m just afraid this is going to break every GNOME update and it’s going to be annoying.
Updating is not too bad, as long as you don’t update as soon as new major Gnome version is available. I usually wait a few months, and by then all extensions are either updated, replaced by a fork, or obsolete.