Liking the fullscreen app search thingamafuck is your prerogative even if I feel this kind of UX is only at home on a mobile phone (also I'm fairly sure Plasma can also do that with some fennagling--)
The thing people (me included) detest about GNOME has very little to do with that anyway, peeps don't like how locked down it is and how it refuses to support certain features thought to be 'basic', so you have to use extensions.... Which can be janky on occasion -- And definitely will get abandoned by their creators and disabled when you upgrade GNOME version.
Valid. I'm a pretty new Linux convert (6 months or so) and gnome is what I landed on. I tried KDE Plasma and it was okay, maybe I am not giving it enough of a chance. I noticed the desktop and windows were kind of flickering as well, not sure why. Nvidia graphics card, so it's already a bit janky anyway.
You can change out the Windows-style start menu on Plasma for the "Application Launcher" button which will be a fullscreen app launcher like in GNOME. Or are you wanting something different?
I also prefer a larger app launcher. Like why should it be small, how is that actually better for usability? Why have it cramped in the bottom left, what's that all about?
It seems to me that people do it that way because that's how they're used to it ever since Win95. Not because it's actually better. But idk.
I love the design, but it seems in my machine there are zero animations (not even a fade in when opening it) is this intentional or something wrong with my setup? Not a deal breaker, but a bit jarring with how smooth the rest of the desktop is.
Sounds like Ubuntu underneath your Plasma. I've had the exact same experience when using Neon, Kubuntu, and Ubuntu+KDE. I install any non-Ubuntu based distro with KDE (like openSUSE) and whiz bang everything is working again.
The last time I tried it it crashed just from moving the panel around on the desktop. After a reboot it didn't do it again. Plasma just does odd things like that sometimes.
And if you used Plasma 4 all the way up to around Plasma 5.15/5.16, Plasma was practically unusable due to instability. It's why Plasma stopped being the default DE of choice and Gnome took over.
Plasma has improved a lot over the past year or two in particular, but it's not close to as stable as, say, Gnome or Cinnamon.