I don't find dash to dock necessary at all. I just hit super key and type, or use the 3 finger pinch touchpad gesture to open the overview. In any case, in my

I don't find dash to dock necessary at all. I just hit super key and type, or use the 3 finger pinch touchpad gesture to open the overview. In any case, in my experience extensions aren't as brittle as you're implying, they generally only stop working after a major gnome version update (e.g. 3.32 > 3.34) which you wouldn't get through an apt-get update. I haven't had any swapping issues at all, but I suppose this could be hardware dependent (e.g. nvidia drivers are known to cause serious memory leaks with mutter)