Do you know which is the most popular GNOME extension out there?
I don’t know for sure, but if I have to make a guess, I would say Dash to Dock is a good candidate for that title.
Why do I say that? Because at the time of writing this article, this extension has more than ten million downloads.
What is Dash to Dock?
In the clean GNOME layout, you don’t see any quick launcher. It’s just the wallpaper. You press the Super key (Windows key), a launcher appears at the side or on the bottom. This launcher is called Dash in GNOME. The Dash to Dock extension takes the “dash” from GNOME Activities Overview and “docks” it to make it visible on the desktop all the time.
Try running it on something like an older Celeron, a RaspberryPi 3, a PinePhone, or a constrained VM. For me alt+tab can take seconds on GNOME but still be almost instant in Xfce on the same hardware.
I assume it’s from Wayland not performing as well on these platforms combined with fancy animated transitions being enabled by default on G.
It can be about not having to change hardware as much as about habits.