GNOME has been my favorite desktop environment[1] for quite some time. While I always make it a point to check out other environments from time to time, there are some aspects of the GNOME desktop that are hard to live without. While there are many great desktop environments out there, GNOME[2] feels like home to me. Here are some of the features I enjoy most about GNOME.
Stability
Having a stable working environment is the most important aspect of a desktop for me. After all, the feature set of an environment doesn't matter at all if it crashes constantly and you lose work. For me, GNOME is rock-solid. I have heard of others experiencing crashes and instability, but it always seems to be due to either the user running GNOME on unsupported hardware or due to faulty extensions (more on that later). On my end, I run GNOME primarily on hardware that is known to be well-supported in Linux (System76[3], for example). I also have a few systems that are not as well supported (a custom-built desktop and a Dell Latitude laptop), and I actually don't have any issues there either. For me, GNOME is rock-solid. I have compared stability in other well-known desktop environments, and I had unfortunate results. Nothing comes close to GNOME when it comes to stability.
Extensions
I really enjoy being able to add additional functionality to my environment. I don't necessarily require any extensions, because I am perfectly fine with stock-GNOME with no extensions whatsoever. However, having the ability to add a few things here and there, is welcome. GNOME features various extensions to do things such as add a weather display to your panel, and much more. This