I really, really hope Cosmic turns out to be a good DE, because Gnome does a lot of cool stuff that I really like, but the actual experience of using it is miserable for me. It always feels like it's fighting against everything I want to do.

I'm glad Gnome exists, but we need an option that does some of the cool and unique things they do while also being less opinionated.

Agree, my work flow is basically entirely broken without dash-to-panel, which is maintained by like one guy lol.

The ideas behind the GNOME Shell desktop metaphor have stayed consistent through the 3.x cycle, at least from ~3.10. The "problem" with GNOME 3.x is that it implements core ideas in the workflow that the user needs to grasp. Either you use it as they thought you should or you are better off with some other DE.

Sure, you may need some extension to feel more comfortable. I do use a couple, but if you need extensions to make it functional you really should consider switching to another DE/WM.

Yeah, it's kind of ridiculous. At this point my most starred git repos are all patches to get various extensions working on the current gnome release.

I've been looking to switch away but nothing I've used has had the it factor I want.

One of the reasons I prefer KDE or MATE. Too many extensions needed to make it usable. I also don't like the fact that they're installed through their website instead of your local package manager.

So basically it’s just another GNOME release gotcha.

AFAIK, the extension developer needs to explicitly set each version of Gnome they support. Even when the Gnome version doesn't have any breaking changes, the extension developer still needs to update their extension to enable their extension for the new Gnome version.

GTK never broke public API.

I had to orphan a very simple extension I wrote for gnome 3.2-3.10 It was a bugfix that for some reason upstream didn't even want to acknowledge it existed, and never accepted the patch. So I made the extension, but after about a year of constant breakages I gave up.

That ordeal really made me feel unappreciated as a contributor.

Seriously though, a stable API is not the GTK/GNOME developers’ agenda here. Nobody wanting a stable API should write software with this toolkit.

This blog post doesn't mention GTK, but I've heard GTK will sometimes implement breaking changes in minor version bumps. I was thinking about writing some software with GTK, and I haven't been deterred so I guess I'll learn the hard way, but has GTK 4 had any of these stability problems yet?

Yes but it would have been nicer to have a transition period in which both methods are supported for a little while so that you don't literally break every extension in existence up to this release

I find it naive to think GNOME would suddenly start caring about compatibility as moving to a standard doesn't guarantee such.

Arch does too, albeit to a lesser extent. Gnome updates usually take around 4 to 5 weeks after the official release to hit the Pacman repos.

Means you can stay bleeding edge but avoid day 1 breakages for the most part.

gnome-shell-extension-appindicator moved to the new modules system 3 weeks ago

Yeah! They should have invented their own obscure language for no reason rather than use probably the single most well known programming language on earth!

The same it does everywhere else. Capitalizing on the sheer number of web devs, and the fact that we get things done without being petty about things we don't like.

Um, you're like more than a decade too late to ask this question. Javascript is pretty much everywhere now, whether you like it or not.

For the record, I dislike it as well - not the language itself mind you, but the fact that they're using it to make bloated desktop apps and desktop UX. Long gone are the days when devs cared about performance, sometimes going as far as writing code in ASM to get the most out of paltry hardware.

Nowadays, even a $25 computer like the Raspberry Pi has enough computing resources to run bloated JS apps, so no one really cares any more, except for old fogies like us who grew up using entire operating systems that fit on a single floppy disk.