Comment by thaumasiotes 3 days ago
I've been using XFCE ever since Ubuntu decided the future of desktop computing was to imagine that your monitor was an iPhone, and GNOME inexplicably decided that they needed to copy that approach as soon as possible.
The menu bar is a useful pattern, but a lot of applications don't need it. Especially if the focus is on a single task. In this case it's preferable to have a few buttons that are always useful, a handful of options tucked away, and a settings dialog for configuring the behavior of the software. And for the software that don't fit in this category (LibreOffice, GIMP, Audacity,...), they can still have the menu bar.
The menu bar isn't obtrusive, but for a lot of software, it's just quick access to common settings (VLC).
I thought that way too (even having gone to tiling windows managers), but gnome is fine and way usable than macOS. The few applications where I use the menu still have it, and so far I’m only using one extension (for clipboard managememt).