Good observation. Turning off extensions is where OP lost me. In the last year, the single biggest quality of life improvement for me has been discovering the

Good observation. Turning off extensions is where OP lost me. In the last year, the single biggest quality of life improvement for me has been discovering the Argos[0] extension, which basically lets you put whatever text/menus you want in the top bar by writing scripts that print to stdout. To save space, I hid the dock (I use [1] as a replacement alt-tab), so the top bar is the only piece of screen that isn't OS chrome. On my top bar right now I have the time in four time zones (including the ever-important UTC to save a mental calculation when logging at logs), the name of the current Wifi access point, and some VPN details gleaned using a combination of ip r, ping, nc, and curl. Another extension shows free RAM. I look at them dozens of times a day. [0] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1176/argos/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1176/argos/ [1] https://gist.github.com/cbd32/cbec9a32b32bd9e93b0d2696c71b5f03 https://gist.github.com/cbd32/cbec9a32b32bd9e93b0d2696c71b5f...