I know people complain about all the changes in Gnome versions. I generally don’t care. For example I liked the vertical workspaces better but I’m not going to worry about the change. For the first time I hit a real problem with the defaults.
I have an arcade machine (reused machine, reused television for sound/display, xarcade controls and wooden case). I have it default to loging in and running EmulationStation. The latest Gnome starts in overview mode instead of going to EmulationStation. For the time being I switched to using Gnome Classic.
Never heard of it. Looks like what I want. I am running more than one application so I’ll have to see how that works. EmulationStation is running all the time but it spawns SuperTuxKart, Shippy 1984, etc.
There’s also an extension which changes the start-in-overview behavior, but I haven’t tried that. I think the kiosk mode should match your usecase — and, if that comes up in overview mode, that’s probably a bug.