Fedora Silverblue and Silverblue specifically. I used to run Arch and did all the cool things from DE customization to custom kernels and other cool shit with scripts and so on. Now I just want a system that I know will boot and just do it’s thing

Notifications?

I have extensions that do small QOL things. I can still use GNOME just fine without a single one of them enabled.

How do you cope with the lack of a dock and system tray?

I don’t cope with that. I don’t really see a huge benefit to having a system tray. Before GNOME 44 added the background apps view to the quick settings menu I just put anything that was ‘background’ into a workspace. Even after 44 I still have this habit and rarely actually need the background view.

As for the dock argument I’m not sure what an always visible dock would provide that the current dash does not. I think I might even prefer the current dash over an always visible dock. Whenever I want to switch windows I just go to the overview and pick out whatever window I want. It’s a lot easier to hit a huge window than to have to target a small icon at the bottom of the display.

I understand that some people might disagree but I actually love what GNOME does (most of the time).