[arch-general] Tips for a stable GNOME Shell?

[Giovanni Santini]

Good evening,
I am writing here since I do believe people here might have found
solutions already to my problems.

Sadly, I am the problem, as I love GNOME Shell (ops).
Jokes aside, I love its interface and behaviour; although, it is really
hard to use it on a real-context basis for me.
What it happens is that if I execute RAM-consuming applications, GNOME
Shell behaves really badly, swapping a lot with memory.

The usual scenario is me trying to send some e-mails, while I have
Visual Studio Code and Firefox for some coding; usually, this leads to
huge slowdown, up to making the system unusable.

This doesn't happen when using a GNOME-friendly i3 session, executing by
far many more RAM-consuming applications (such as running Franz with
multiple services, Telegram Desktop and others).

I got some good boosts from the following actions:
- Disabling almost all the Shell extensions, except for my 'essential' ones.
- Using a X11 session instead of Wayland
- Tweaking swap and VFS parameters (there is a web article referenced in
the ArchWiki which is really good)

So I have two questions:
1. Am I nuts? Did I do something really bad to my GNOME Shell without
knowing that? How could I repair my setup?
2. If this is it (GNOME Shell is TOO heavy), is there any lightweight DE
that offers something similar? I would need at least the search within
apps and files for sure.

Thanks in advance for replies and sorry for such a long message.

-- 
Giovanni Santini
My blog: http://giovannisantini.tk
My code: https://git{hub,lab}.com/ItachiSan
My GPG: 2FADEBF5