>Configuration With dconf
If you do this just know that the Gtk devs consider most gsettings to be private and any end user changes made with dconf might just disappear one day and never come back. Or they might be left in but just not respected by gtk so that setting them does nothing. As a GNOME user on the latest Gtk4 you're not supposed to be customizing your desktop like in the article. It is not supported even if you can (for now) technically do it. Support issues related to removal/ignoring of gsettings will be told this and closed.
I would rephrase this concern as "dconf is not a stable API" rather than "you are not supposed to do this". It's my computer, I am supposed to do whatever I want, but using unstable API comes with costs that should be understood.
> It's my computer, I am supposed to do whatever I want
I don't think the Gnome devs share that view.
I suppose Gnome is aimed at the Red Hat enterprise customer base. Those computers are no private systems, they are company hardware. What matters for company hardware is standardization: easy to roll out, easy to train users, which means a standardized, simple GUI. Building @hellodanylo 's dream workflow isn't the mission and doesn't scale anyway.
If you want a custom desktop workflow exactly to your specification build it yourself or pay someone to build it. Expecting people with different opinions to do it for you for free will certainly be a disappointment.
>> Gnome is aimed at the Red Hat enterprise customer base. Those computers are no private systems, they are company hardware. What matters for company hardware is standardization: easy to roll out, easy to train users, which means a standardized, simple GUI.
This is largely the case:
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/gnome-desktop...
As stated in https://lwn.net/Articles/600506/: "When a project is controlled by a single company, that company's needs will almost certainly win out over anything that the wider community may want to do."
On the other hand, when a project tries to please everybody it will undoubtedly regress into a mess of options, toggles, extra buttons, have an atrocious UX and only be usable for the 'in crowd'.
The few OSS tools I know to not have a terrible UX are tools built by a single author or a small team with a coherent vision. It's definitely a place where the bazaar model of software development doesn't seem to work as wonderful as with OS kernels or development tools.
However, I think the GNOME 3 and 4 designers went too far and alienated many users:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-3-4...
https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-42-the-nonsense-continues-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/wte7tr/gnomes_design...
https://linuxreviews.org/GNOME_Developers_have_Made_Their_Mo...
https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming...
When a designer's "coherent vision" eclipses the needs of the software's users then users get frustrated and either fork the project or go to another project. MATE (https://mate-desktop.org/), Cinnamon (https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon), and Unity (https://unityd.org/) exist largely because of how far the GNOME 3 designers went and how they were not willing to compromise their "coherent vision":
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=121162
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1910
https://web.archive.org/web/20101129161856/http://www.pcworl...