Wow this thread is still alive 
I am 24 days in and confident I just made a switch from MacOS to Ubuntu for good. Not saying I wonât ever use MacOS again, just that Ubuntu Linux is truly my main OS now. That was quite a long time for such a short distance. Like I said in my original post, I started playing around with Ubuntu way back when, then took a short break of a decade (or something like thatâŚ) before arriving here. Feels like returning home in some strange philosophical way.
Well⌠I took a deep breath after upgrading from Ubuntu 17.10. Just said to myself WOW! This is too good to be true 
- But now I can say it openly and loudly - WOW, WOW, WOW!!!
Two main reasons :
My hardware is so old I just couldnât believe it will work at all but also couldnât resist trying it anyway.
It worked perfectly out of the box (including my HP printer that was a pain all along since Ubuntu 10.10).
Itâs fast, snappy and I love it!
Kodus to you all!
I only miss global and locally integrated menus in terms of screenspace. I hate to navigate through menus. Why donât just provide some clever toolbars in your application instead of letting the user navigate through 10 menus and sub-menus?
Anyways, yeah this screenspace issue is still present. Even if you use no title bar (much better than pixel-saver 
) because you still have that wasted space with menus in apps that use it.
This is basically my only issue left why I would wish unity7 would have never leave âusâ. Everything else is just better in my opinion. The dash! The window overview/workspace handling. Holy cow 
Fully agree with you on the activities/workspaces overview. Itâs a bit slow, but it is an awesome feature and I wish I had learned about it sooner. To add to the discussion, one more gripe is not being able to connect to bluetooth devices from the panel/notification area directly, like you could in Unity. While there is the sound device chooser extension to choose audio devices, there is no such thing for bluetooth devices. This just creates too many clicks.
The release is great, much improved since 17.10. As other people mentioned, gnome compares unfavourably to unity in several areas though:
In other areas is well ahead. Mixed DPI setups in wayland are possible, but not in all apps. Something has to be done for autoscaling of XWayland apps when moving them about monitors.
Is this measurable? If you can find what specific actions result in a great increase in battery consumpion on Wayland then they should be filed as bugs against Wayland, I think? ubuntu-bug wayland Same for the 4K display but with ubuntu-bug gnome-shell. If they complain that the bug isnât actionable then try to be as specific as possible and argue that the bug should be kept open because itâs a problem that needs resolving (even if we have to wait years for the resolution).
I just donât think this is a concern for GNOME (and it shouldnât necessarily be). GNOME aims to be minimalistic and has thick title bars for touchscreens (you may think this is bending over backwards for those with touchscreens but I think that itâs good that the user interface works well out-of-the-box for both touch and non-touch computers rather than adjusting according to whether the computer has touch or not (as Windows does for some of its UI)). Also, since GNOME apps (and others) use CSD and/or hamburger menus (Firefox, Chromium), LIM isnât necessary for those applications. It helps for other applications but isnât necessary.
If this is essential for youâŚI agree that the GNOME experience (even with extensions) wonât be great, youâre probably better off with an Ubuntu flavour like Ubuntu MATE (with the Mutiny layout), rather than using the GNOME default.
âup to scratchâ in your view 
Some people (like WOGUE (I think?) and at least one commenter on OMG!) adore vanilla GNOME, from what I can tell, and hate Ubuntuâs deviations from it and patching of it, âwhy deviate from upstream?â they would say. Impossible to keep everyone happy, some do like Ubuntuâs small modifications (Ubuntu Dock, AppIndicator/kStatusNotifierItem support, theme isnât Adwaita, desktop icons supported (a forum user here regrets not having Files 3.28 and doesnât care about desktop icons)), but others donât. If thereâs something that reliably causes crashes then could you try and isolate what extension that is and report a bug against it? Iâm sure there are others who would appreciate a fix and it can only be fixed if the crash is noticed by someone and reporting helps with this!
It has the slightly strange login shield thing and doesnât use the desktop background but other than that?
What bugs in particular? Are they reported? ubuntu-bug gdm3 will do the trick. If youâre getting the issue where you attempt to login with an incorrect password and then attempt with a correct one and you just get the background with the cursor, please mark yourself as affected by this bug which is listed in the release notes. There is a workaround.
Maybe worth running ubuntu-bug gnome-shell for that? Youâll probs then need to file the bug upstream (and link between the two bugs).
Please report when you find bugs with ubuntu-bug wayland. Thereâs a few known issues which you can mark yourself as affected by, but do report others!
Iâm quite active on the bug trackers upstream and in launchpad. Iâm watching dozens about libinput, wayland, gnome shell⌠you name it, Iâm there.
Eg lack of panels on second monitors: itâs a pointless thing to report since this is a feature that would be implemented upstream, and gnome are certainly not very receptive in this area. I have dozens of WONTFIXes in my gnome bug tracker account.
Thanks for reporting them!
Of course mate, I only want gnome to improve 