> It's not: https://extensions.gnome.org/

That's not user friendly customization:

(1) When there's something that's called "Remove Accessibility" on the front page that's indicative of a broader problem. A tiny little script to remove the accessibility menu (which most people probably don't use) from the top panel? Couldn't this be a simple checkbox integrated natively into GNOME 3 instead of a third party download? Why is the accessibility menu there by default in the first place if very few people are going to use it? Honestly, this is something I'd expect in a Microsoft product, not in a community-based open source project.

(2) I already mentioned in my previous post how customization depends on "random third party add-ons downloaded from the Internet via their website" so I am aware of this. It's not a counterpoint to my post.

(3) Compared to "App Stores" or even distributions' repositories, that website is a terribly designed way to download content.[1] It is not user friendly or modern. The only modern aspect is updating a desktop environment via a browser.

(3b) Is there even a way to automatically update these extensions? Can I see the source code? Where is the average rating display and the sort by ratings even though ratings and reviews exist? Why can't I sort by rating even though there are apparently ratings in the comment system? Is it curated or can anyone upload malware there? Is it a secure site or could someone circumvent the security measures easily? There are many more questions, mostly of design, quality, and trust. If you have a Linux (or BSD) distribution, you (hopefully) trust the software in its repositories.

(4) Speaking of a distro's repositories, shouldn't this kind of thing be managed in your distro's repositories? Well, it should except that GNOME 3 has so many problems, bad defaults, and (of course) missing options that could easily be placed in its configuration menus. There are simply too many necessary extensions, which forces this to happen. Many of these only do very tiny things that certainly wouldn't justify their own independent package, like "Alternative Status Menu" that merely separates Suspend, Hibernate, and Shutdown.[2] Yet again, just a line in a configuration GUI would be preferable.[3] (I mean the official configuration GUI, not the Tweak Tool.)

(5) Why do users have to trust random downloads from a browser? I mean, I suppose we could all code extensions ourselves and get rid of this trust issue, but this isn't emacs. This is meant to be a default desktop environment, the first thing a newbie Linux user will see. Not every single user of the OS is supposed to be computer professionals (especially given GNOME's new target audience). Programming shouldn't have to be a prerequisite to having a usable desktop enviornment. Wizards or configuration menus will be something the typical user is used to. Code integrated into the desktop will be faster, more reliable, trusted, installed and updated via yum/apt/etc., and so on. Many of these things are already toggled in hidden ways and could easily be configured explicitly through the official GUI in a way that's tested and trusted.

I could go on. I won't. It's too easy.[4]

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[1] There are probably hundreds or maybe thousands of people who read Hacker News (I'm not sure how many active users there are) who could code up a better website as a weekend project. Why does the largest desktop environment in the FOSS world have such a terrible way to download extensions?

[2] Yet another minor annoyance: shutdown is hidden by default behind the modifier key Alt. There is no easy built-in way to change this. When I used GNOME I had to Google command line magic to trick GNOME into thinking my computer was incapable of suspending to get the shutdown to display by default on the menu. Apparently the One True Way to deal with "turning off" your computer is to suspend it and pretend it's off.[5] And since Shutdown is capable of being displayed on the menu without a modifier key instead of Suspend when you do some command line magic, that means yet again it would be trivial to make it able to be toggled in a menu since the functionality already exists!

[3] I hope you're noticing a pattern here.

[4] There was a thread on Hacker News calling PHP a "fractal of bad design". GNOME 3's shell is certainly a fractal of bad design. My post was a broad overview of what is annoying about it for the sake of being concise. That might be surprising due to its length, but I was holding back the entire time I wrote it. I can go more in depth on various parts if challenged.

[5] There's one really annoying thing you'll notice about GNOME 3 shell's philosophy of there being one way to do things and no trivial way (downloading third-party scripts where a checkbox would do is not trivial) to change it. Remember the example of the accessibility menu being enabled by default: GNOME shell's way of doing things is rarely in line with the most common ways GNOME 2 was used. Thus, old GNOME users upgrading will have to actively fight against the defaults. That's about as close to being user hostile as you can get, almost literally being hostile.