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GNOME 3 is an easy and elegant way to use your computer. It is designed to put you in control and bring freedom to everybody. GNOME 3 is developed by the GNOME community, a diverse, international group of contributors that is supported by an independent, non-profit foundation.
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Cons
Con Some settings are not where the user would expect it
E.g. it is not possible to change the keyboard auto-repeat delay or rate from the usual All Setting > Keyboard like, for example, in Unity.
Many settings are considered "tweaks" and require installing a separate utility to adjust.
Further still, some settings are buried in a dconf database.
Con Longtime support is hard since every few years GNOME changes its own standards
Everytime something is complete GNOME breaks itself:
Icon naming changes almost every 3 years : once gtk icons were named stock_edit then gtk-edit then edit-edit and currently edit-edit-symbolic
- App icons change also every few years currently they get renamed to an android like scheme eg: org.gnome.Photos.svg instead of gnome-photos.svg however this breaks all common standards esp. since filenames on linux are case sensitive.
GNOMEShell extension also break on almost every release.
Currently Gtk3 has been stabilized however they are already working on GTK4 and 5 so in the worst case your desktop will need to run and support 4 GTK-toolkits at the same time.
Con Hefty (lots of dependencies)
Gnome 3 in the current state is heavily weighed down by having a lot of functions as requirements, rather than options. You MUST have their email client, calendar, and more installed as the environment relies on them directly for basic functionality. Which is absurd as most other DEs don't require a specific calendar program just to tell you what day it is.
Con Minimalistic, but "huge" in size
It has some of the minimalist approach, but at the same time Gnome is huge in size, in memory usage, in CPU and GPU usage. Gnome is just too big for what it offers: almost nothing in matter of customization and complex features, you can see it just by using Gnome apps like Gedit. Lacking basic features and being huge in "size".
Con Customization is only "Gnome Tweaks" and "Extensions"
Nothing much to do, especially if you use Vanilla Gnome. If you want Gnome to has X and Y feature you would need an extension for almost everything you want making it bigger and bigger. Also, you can't change the shell theme easily without an extension, you can't change the application and icon theme without an application like Gnome Tweaks (unless you use the terminal and that is not user-friendly).
Con Full screen start menu
This may be fine if your screen is really small, but on modern fullhd desktop it looks ugly and distracting. In addition to very ineffective display of items on screen - much more could be placed on one screen if there were less empty space around and between icons
Con Icon scalability and sorting
The icons in the "apps view" area don't have any additional sizes, the current ones are much too large to be effective for the screen space they use. Also, there is no native way to sort them in Gnome, only a very limited extension. Which means you're pretty much always better off using the search bar if you can.
Con Default alt-tab behaviour is cute but extremely annoying for fast keyboard users
Con Native Gnome dock isn't scalable
The native Gnome dock isn't scalable, which means if you want to change its size you have to download a customized theme for the shell and hope it has the appearance you want. Honestly again just like the icon issue it wastes way too much of the screen on high resolution monitors.