There is a heck of a lot of opinion in this article. GNOME itself and the direction they’ve taken has been a source of endless debate.
I remember the time they took out the transparency options in GNOME Terminal for the same reasons used in this article. One person’s “bloat” is another persons much loved feature.
I mean the ideal solution here is include all of those features by default and then allow users to turn them off/remove them as they please
Personally I think pretty much everything included in gnome is pretty essential to a standard desktop experience, if you start chopping bits off and don’t have anything to replace them with you end up with a nonfunctional system as far as the average user is concerned
Gnome is mostly removing features to make maintenance easier for them. They’d rather push the narrative that there is one right way to do things and settings are unnecessary. Needless to say, this has bit them in the bum many times and will continue to do so as time goes on. Remember how adamant they were about a sidedock with no option to change it?
dconf can also be configured with text files (with a format similar to ‘.ini’ files), although enabling this support isn’t trivial, and it’s not the most well documented feature.
I also used to run a ”lobotomized” Gnome, but TBH I found it easier in the long run to start from a minimal base.
I want good text rendering and windows and buttons with rounded corners. I want my laptop to work correctly when connecting it to external displays or projectors without a lot of futzing around. I want vsync to work with my monitor out of the box, I want to be able to watch video without tearing, and I want a desktop that has first class support for high-DPI displays. I also want to have some basic integration with the other system features provided by my distro, which increasingly means high-quality integration with NetworkManager and different systemd components. I want to get integrated notifications when a program segfaults on my computer or in case there’s an SELinux AVC denial.
The short answer is that it's not anything like a trivial transition, and the best-case scenario appears to be precisely what you already have after you invest a substantial amount of time.
For ages, I thought it was actually outright broken, but it turns out that if your GPU is Nvidia, you need to pass a special argument and agree not to report issues. This is obvious on the CLI but invisible if you try to start an environment the standard way by selecting it in your display manager. Then you WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS=1 if you actually want to see a cursor. I'm sure proponents believe its Nvidia's problem that they haven't provided better support for a niche of a niche of a niche, but some of us would like to do actual work and don't care whose fault it is that something works shitty.
Then there is scaling for those of us with high/mixed DPI. Xwayland windows end up so blurry that you would be forgiven for imagining you had a head injury. I don't want to worry about replacing any app that doesn't support Wayland again to have no benefit of any kind. In fact since some apps are to interact with other people I can't just change them out regardless of wayland support. There is no plan to fix this.
Beyond that flameshot doesn't work correctly, replacing xcape with interception tools looks quite complicated, and depending on what app and version you use screen sharing may or may not break and other people give zero fucks about your niche environment.
ahh yeah, i heard nvidia can be a pain in the ass with sway/wayland. did you try sway when you still needed the –my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia flag lol?
but i remember reading about some new driver that made things much better… no idea though i’ve always been on intel-only laptops
mixes dpi
never had any issues with that. although i don’t think i even have anything going through xwayland at this point
apps to interact with ppl
zoom? or something electron-based?
xcape
i don’t know the tool, but the readme sounds like evdoublebind might work, it’s rock solid for me, replacing caps lock with escape on tap/alt om hold
screensharing
i feel you. when i started out with sway i had this horrible hack running a vnc server and a x11 vnc client on the same machine because pre-pipewire browsers could only share x11 windows haha
but nowadays that works really well. only zoom is still a little annoying ux wise. sometimes their screenshare popup just disappears leaving me with no way to stop a share gracefully.