Many people run programs by double-clicking an icon and interacting only with the GUI window.
But while gossip is a GUI desktop program, it also outputs a lot of messages to the console as it runs. I recommend you keep the console open and pay some attention to errors or other odd behavior that may become apparent from the console messages.
Gossip logs a lot, and important messages can get missed. In order to only see the important messages, you can change the log level. Every log message is tagged by a log level, one of error, warn, info, debug or trace. You can specify a cut-off to see fewer messages by setting the environment variable RUST_LOG to the level you desire, such as RUST_LOG=warn. If not specified otherwise, gossip defaults to the info log level. There are other things you can specify in RUST_LOG, such as which level to log on a crate-by-crate basis. For example: RUST_LOG="warn,gossip=info,gossip_lib=info,nostr_types=info", or turning logging off entirely with RUST_LOG=off. See env_logger documentation for more.
Gossip logs to stderr by default now (this used to be stdout). This helps differentiate log messages from command line outputs.
For some systems with slow storage devices, you can run gossip faster using the --rapid command line parameter. However, a crash can corrupt local data under this mode if your filesystem does not preserve write ordering.
This is usually not necessary. But if gossip is panicking you can get backtrace information by setting the environment variable RUST_BACKTRACE=1 when executing gossip.
Gossip has a lot of command line commands for tweaking things or extracting bits of information from its database. These commands to execute are specified on the command line.
Try gossip help and see Gossip Commands