[pjmlp]

As someone that used GNOME 1.0, was contributor to Gtkmm for a brief moment, the fact that GNOME 3.0 needs so many extensions, versus GNOME 1.0 - 2.0 default experience, and its dependency on JavaScript already rules it out for me.

Indeed, Ubuntu has to ship additional GNOME extensions for basic features Unity already offered, and they didn't want a revolt when decided to drop Unity.

[a022311]

This is true, I don't like the fact that JS is needed either, but as someone who has used Unity as well, the current state of GNOME is much better in other aspects. As far as I can tell, JS was chosen to make it easier to extend, without requiring knowledge of systems programming languages like C, while also preventing all sorts of memory bugs which could crash the whole desktop (technically still possible, but harder to accidentally do).

[pjmlp]

Vala exists.

There are also enough famous GJS memory leak issues in the past.

https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem...

[amlib]

> GNOME 3.0 needs so many extensions

Unless you want to significantly change how gnome works (nothing wrong with that! It's awesome you can do tons of experimenting that way) you really only need two or three extensions to work around bone headed decisions from the gnome team.

> versus GNOME 1.0 - 2.0 default experience

I honestly think GNOME pre 3.something sucked and always saw KDE 3 as vastly superior (KDE 3 mod even more so) than gnome of those days. Things got a lot rougher with KDE in version 4 and even 5 but they seem to be course correcting and producing something finally mostly superior to KDE 3.

> and its dependency on JavaScript already rules it out for me.

Its not a full browser running in gnome, but actually their own thing with a much more reasonable footprint (haha get it?) and a lot less baggage than a full web view. There is no npm ecosystem, no crazy 1000s of libraries dependency for each extension, no DOM, very simple and direct CSS implementation, no web APIs and so on. Anyway, what other dynamic language would you recommend to be used in this situation? Python? Would that really be better in terms of speed and memory usage?

> Indeed, Ubuntu has to ship additional GNOME extensions for basic features Unity already offered,

Well, duh, gnome is not unity so for ubuntu to make GNOME into unity they do need a way to modify it, and I bet you they are glad they can just use the extension system rather than keep a giant patchset of C code that they need to maintain each release (well they do, but it's much smaller than it would have to be if no extension system existed.).

Besides, Canonical can easily deal with their own extensions breaking each release because they are the distribution and can plan around it, breaking is more of a problem for the extensions that users add, and I do agree GNOME ought to come up with a better way of handling it.