Gnome 3 isn't for people with low end and legacy hardware, or for those with neurological conditions that inhibit recollection of words.
If you don't have a relatively new and powerful machine and cannot easily recall the names of the Gnome software suite, well, it's not going to work well for you.
I'm running Gnome 3 on a 6-year-old dual-core laptop without any issues, I wouldn't call that recent or powerful. But running it on a Pentium 4 probably isn't the best idea.
About the naming: could you clarify this? The default software launcher allows you to search by keywords as well, so "mail", "email", "calendar" will all launch Evolution. Likewise, "camera", "webcam", or "photo" will all show Cheese. The same applies to all other apps. Granted, the names are a bit bad considering their purpose, but the icons make it quite clear to me.
That's a powerful machine. It won't run well on most common SBCs, for instance, let alone the hundreds of millions of older machines the world over that chug along with older versions of Windows.
Searching by noun is a problem for numerous neurological impairments. Some people have trouble spelling, typing and recollection, and the absence of desktop icons limits their ability to use spatial awareness and movement to operate the desktop environment.
Honestly, what drove me away from it was the fact that the whole DE seems to run on a single thread, meaning that any extension or animation going on the top panel, or anything else on the interface for that matter, creates microstutters in the compositor.
I have a relatively beefy machine (AMD FX 8 cores @4.4GHz, R9 290x GPU), if I have an application running at 60fps (something really simple like glxgears) and I click on any panel menu (like the calendar), the application stutters.
I'm now using Budgie, haven't looked back since I've tried it.
I think GNOME 3 is just a bit vocal in their design philosophy. The workflow is different from other DEs so it can feel either minimalist or restrictive, depending on how you choose to look at it.
What killed me more is how Unity was basically just a rrally bad clone of Gnome 3 and I find it so unecessary. Gnome 3 is extendable in ways Unity never achieved. I wish they had spent their efforts just making Gnome 3 extendable for future releases not just fork it immediately.
I dont mind Unity but I can get a similar enough experience just using Gnome 3.
I do have to agree though Gnome 3 is a whole other DE than Gnome 2. You either have to use XFCE or Mate to get back that old feel from Mate.
At least with KDE4 it was just unstable but it was still a familiar enough DE. I do miss the first time use wizard KDE used to have though where it asked what OS you were most accustomed to and adjusted shortcuts and file manager behaviors to those experiences.
What's funny is how nostalgia for Unity has surged after Ubuntu 18.04 was shipped with GNOME. I've found the UX of 18.04 on GNOME to be far superior compared to Unity in 16.04.
I didn't hate it, I am indifferent about it. I am not seeing a huge difference in my use of Unity vs Gnome. I use Unity (14.04) at work and Gnome (Pop_OS!) at home.
After giving a fair chance to Gnome 3 and Unity I decided to seek refuge in XFCE 4. I was a happy user of Gnome 2, but I'm not sure how things are today.
