Hi,
I used to be a big fan of GNOME the way it got out of my way when I didn’t need it and no icons in the bottom to take up desktop space. But the top bar just seems so… useless. It holds a few useful icons in the right side (and you can get extensions to add more) but other than this, it’s just taking up space. After a trip past Xfce I’m now on KDE with the bar in the top.
Have I missed anything about the top bar in GNOME Desktop?


It’s almost as if every DE has their own design philosophy they stick to. The minority of loud, hateful circlejerking around GNOME developers because the DE doesn’t fit arbitrary personal preferences is so bizarre.
This ain’t Windows or macOS. You can install a whole new DE that looks how you want and provides all the niche customization options you want. And here’s the kicker: you can do that and simply stop caring about GNOME at all, even to the point you don’t feel like leaving comments like this.
Or like, fork GNOME. All the energy spent devaluing the work of — in many cases unpaid — hobbyist contributors is a bit sick at this point. At points it’s devolved into direct harassment of individuals. And yet, nobody has bothered to fork GNOME. It’s toxic freak behaviour and we shouldn’t be accepting this as the norm in open source.