Here's the list, but the goal first: I want a desktop with only a bottom bar (I'd buy a Mac if I wanted a top one,) a task bar (like old Windows,) status icons and clock in the bottom right (old Windows again?), no laucher / dock on screen, virtual desktops but no animations that move everything on my screen, solid color for the desktop background.

1. Applications Menu - for when I forget the name of an app but I know more or less which category it belongs to.

2. Custom Hot Corners - to disable all actions started by moving the pointer to a corner.

3. Dash to Panel - The important one: panel to the bottom, intellihide the bottom bar, show the taskbar, position the date and system menus, background color, windows previews, workspace isolation, ungroup applications, disable gestures,

4. Desktop Icons - this seems to be a system extension, the only two icons I see are the trash bin and a link to my home directory. I'm not using them from the desktop.

5. Extensions - an extensions menu, useful only when I don't have Firefox open, so basically never. I could remove this extension.

6. GSConnect - not related to desktop customization but even more important IMHO. It's the GNOME implementation of KDE Connect.

7. Notification Center - notifications from the bottom right, in a menu, etc.

8. Places Status Indicator - a menu in the bottom bar with the bookmarks defined in the file manager.

9. Recent Items - a menu in the bottom bar with the recently opened documents.

10. Simple net speed - current bandwidth used by my laptop, in the bottom bar.

11. Sound Input & Output Device Chooser - list of sound output and input devices, set volume per device.

12. Start Overlay in Application View - very important one: when I press the super key I get the list of the available applications instead of the outlines of the open windows (what would I use them for? They are already on my screen.)

13. User Themes - to let me install a theme from my disk.

14. Workspace Switch Wraparound - I have one workspace per customer plus a couple for me. They are arranged horizontally. I go to a workspace with a hotkey but I also move with super-alt left/right and if I want to move a window across workspaces I do it with ctrl-super-alt left/right. This extension makes moving leftward work even on the first workspace and moving rightward works in the last one.

15. Workspaces to Dock - The other important one: it completes Dash to Panel at undoing the remaining default choices of GNOME Shell. Intellihide of the bottom bar (again?), no animations, never see workspace thumbnails, hide the workspace switcher.

I'm not missing the irony of throwing a lot of code at undoing the effects of a lot of code written by GNOME in the last decade. At least they still let us do it.

If somebody's asking why I'm not using another DE: I want to stay on the mayor ones (support and maintenance.) Why not KDE? I had bad memories of KDE around 2014: twice as many clicks than GNOME to do the same thing, especially in settings. Somebody told me that it got better but there is little incentive at investing time to only get where I am now. I'll do it if and when I won't be able to bend GNOME to my desires.