Cool. I love GNOME. I hope one day it will be stable like Windows, the Software Center will be working, there will be only a Wayland session, better Flatpak integration (theming, etc.), accent colors, smooth animations, better performance.
The animations and performance are already very smooth. In fact I feel the performance is better than what you get with windows and the animations are smoother as well
Hmm. Maybe gnome is not correctly using hardware acceleration in your machine¿? In my experience, gnome is perhaps the smoothest DE though it is heavier in resource usage than XFCE, MATE, etc. It does stutter and drop frames when the system is seeing very heavy resource usage.
Edit : when I am using the powersaver settings given by power-profiles-daemon, gnome does stutter a little. This corresponds to amd-pstate being active with the scaling governor set to powersave and the energy vs performance hint set to save power.
It is definitely using hardware acceleration. Most of the time it is smoth, but first opening of the app menu after not opening it for a while gives a lag and frame drop. Nonetheless gnome 40 is much faster than 3. But still waiting for more. Everything on the performance settings. If I use power saving it is not smooth at alll.
Indeed, it is working now, at least on fedora (my current distro). But it was broken a few updates ago. It froze when searchinging, when installing and so on. I tried using it for years on different distributions and it was almost always broken. Best working version I used was on manjaro, but that was 4 years ago, don't know how now. I also tested it on debian few months. ago and it was garbage. One time I was so frustrated I rated it 1/5 in gnome software. I mostly make updates through terminal, because I do not want to get angry anymore.
It was broken almost everywhere a while ago in the way you are describing, it's now pretty solid, but Canonical seriously screwed it up on 24.04 by breaking its dependencies so almost nothing works. Wouldn't be surprised if it's broken on Debian too, especially since that's likely an ancient version by now.