I don't think Gnome is bloated from a feature sense (they keep removing features in fact) its just horrifically bloated from an efficiency sense, it could be orders of magnitude faster than it currently is. It chugs and judders on a first gen i5!
This is not my experience at all. I am using it on my first gneration i3 media center PC and it runs reasonably well. I don't use it for any heavy lifting -I am just starting browsers, running media players and watching videos, but for me it works fine - so well that I don't have any need to check out more lightweight options.
It has more problems with the spotify app than with any of the things I am doing with Gnome (btw I am using Arch on it - so I am still using the latest version).
I suspect it is mostly RAM related, not CPU related. My laptop is an older i5 with Intel graphics and 4GB of RAM, and Gnome Shell (on Wayland) uses about 1GB more memory than Sway (a tiling Wayland compositor) does, which makes a big difference with the same applications. But when it's not under RAM pressure, Gnome is perfectly smooth.
I see lots of comments like this. What I want to know is: if you have this kind of complaint about Gnome, why do you keep using it? There's a bunch of different desktop environments for Linux. KDE works pretty well, and if that doesn't suit you, I've been finding Xfce is quite speedy for me on my work machine.
This isn't like Windows where you're stuck with it if you need that OS for its applications.
Because Gnome is in a league of its own in the UI tastefulness and general UX department.
I like that they are a little opinionated regarding how you use it, in practise that leaves you with a visually tidy and tight desktop environment.
KDE just does not look nice (in my opinion at least), the proportions are weird, menus are too cluttered, it feels like somebody has been throwing widgets at the wall to see what sticks.
I like KDE, but I like Ubuntu more. I've tried Kubuntu, but it's too unstable to be my daily desktop. Gnome is too limiting, but at least it is stable enough.
You can partially improve it by disabling all of the search integrations and just leave application lookup running. Its not perfect, but it fixes the 10 second wait time after you hammer a search term in.
Then you've surely hit the memory reclaim problem. I checked just now and my GNOME Shell started this morning is using 153 MB memory (resident).
There are some latency issues after moving to Wayland, though. Don't have a good link, but AFAIK it has something to do with Mutter or the Shell which were never specifically optimized for latency ending up being responsible for input handling.
It's not just Gnome Shell. I mean, I do hit the memory reclaim issue, but Gnome Shell is still not using that whole extra 1GB. The rest is evolution-data-server and so on.
