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Of course there'd be less criticism if Gnome 3 were a new project. If it were a new project, everyone content with using Gnome 2 would've been able to safely ignore it. Gnome 2 was boring and mediocre, but it worked. Gnome 3 is still worse in many ways than Gnome 2, and--as you said yourself--has not done anything particularly innovative.

It's one thing to go through the pain of a major version transition to make something substantially better, but Gnome 3 hasn't done that. I just read through the release notes for the 3.0, 3.2, and 3.4 releases of Gnome to confirm that I wasn't missing anything, and can find literally nothing that actually makes my life significantly better. When you're making major, breaking changes, you need to be able to justify them. As a user, Gnome 3 has done nothing at all to justify the many hours I spent trying (and failing) to get Gnome 3 to a point where it wasn't actively painful to use. (And reading posts like this gives me no confidence that it's going to get any better.)

I get where you're coming from, but I'm curious how you can evaluate a desktop environment from release notes. To me, GNOME 3 is a clear demonstration of the difference between features and design. Rather than adding new features, it focuses on making them fast and easy to use. I'm not saying GNOME 3 is perfect or for good for everyone, but I don't think it can be evaluated by its feature list.

For the record, I do think GNOME 3 is "substantially better" than previous versions, but I also understand that this is in no way an objective measure and it's perfectly reasonable for us not to hold the same opinion here.

I'm not evaluating it from the release notes--I was rereading them to make sure I wasn't just missing some major improvements I just hadn't noticed while using it. I don't think it's well designed at all, and it's certainly not polished at all, which is an important part of good design.

I suspect that most of the major changes have been on the back end, and that it is a substantially better platform to develop on. Unfortunately, that doesn't affect me at all as a user. I want to be able to run terminals and a web browser and not much else (and I don't think I'm alone in that), and so making Gnome a better environment to develop against is unlikely to make my life any better in the foreseeable future.

I second your feedback on gnome. I finally gave up on Ubuntu about 2 days ago because I persisted with gnome 3 for far too long. It makes simple things easier but everything else much harder. I used to tell windows users why I preferred Ubuntu: 3 logical menus/auto sorted apps, clear separation between settings and administration. Then I was lumbered with this "kids toy" for tablets that made everything less clear (except the few pinned apps).

In this instance, Ubuntu lost me to mint Linux. I expect a similar backlash against Windows 8, although for slightly different reasons.

Enough is enough. Goodbye gnome 3 and Ubuntu.

Ummm... I thought Ubuntu was on Unity, not Gnome 3?

I think this is actually the source of a lot of unfounded hatred for Gnome 3. People aren't always fully aware that Ubuntu is not actually using Gnome Shell, and have instead created their own project, Unity, that just happens to use Gnome for the toolkit. Unity is completely separate from Gnome Shell, and works in quite a different fashion.

I've personally been a huge fan of Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell, and I still think Unity is a terrible, ugly mess. But because many still think that Ubuntu is just using Gnome, they project their distaste for Unity onto Gnome 3 instead of where it belongs...

So I went from MacOS X Lion to Gnome 3, and I have to say, it felt like a positive step -- Lion broke my model of multiple monitors and fullscreen applications; Gnome 3 has a different model to Gnome 2, which I think has been frustrating to people, but straight off the bat, it was better than Lion.

> I just read through the release notes [...] can find literally nothing that actually makes my life significantly better.

So you've never used it, yet feel the need to coment on its features anyway? Try it. Some things, like the dynamic vertically stacked desktops, simple and attention-grabbing notification UI, and clean overview mode (and even the autohiding status bar, which I hated initially but have grown to like), are actually really nice. Yet they aren't going to look very impressive if your only "experience" with them is screenshots and release notes.

It's good. It broke a lot of stuff, and so many people will forever hate it. And it still has bugs (my biggest pet peeve is that being in the overview mode breaks all the desktop keyboard shortcuts) and misfeatures (app-based window selection will never work for me, though the traditional alt-tab mode is now a well-supported extension). But it's good.

Try it for a few weeks, learn it, then come back and flame.

Please actually read what I've written before making assumptions. I have used Gnome 3 for many months and found it to be a step backward in almost every way from Gnome 2.

I read through the release notes to confirm that I wasn't missing anything important in my own use--which I noted in the part of the quoted sentence you excised. I also said, in the same comment you're replying to, that I spent many hours trying to get Gnome 3 to a point where I found it an acceptable desktop environment, and failed.

100% agreed. Although I'm still having a hard time with Alt-~ (Mac-style "switch windows" not apps), I'm very happy with Gnome 3. The number of keystrokes and inches of mouse travel have been greatly reduced over Gnome 2.

The lack of a Start-like menu was initially off-putting, but I've grown to appreciate the lack of that bit of complexity. 99% of the time I run: Chrome, terminal(s), Skype, Pidgin and WebStorm/PyCharm, so I don't need to fiddle with settings or wonder about where in a menu an application resides. When I do need to find an app, the action button and search are perfect.

The only thing I miss in Gnome 3 are the many taskbar plugins that show mem/processor usage, but those will come. Otherwise, Gnome 3 does a great job getting out of my way while I do my work.

You mean something like these?

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/120/system-monitor/

Yep, this is a major part of GNOME3 that most people haven't yet noticed. Thanks to it being done in JavaScript, you can hack your desktop like a web app: https://cannonerd.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/hack-gnome3-like-...

This includes stuff like reload (Alt-F2 r) and a reasonably nice data inspector (Alt-F2 lg).

lg is much more than just a data inspector, it's a full-blown REPL. The fact that you can jump in and interactively eval code directly in the running process is huge and opens things up to a whole new level of hackability.

And there is a DBUS interface for it, so you can even push code into the shell from external processes.

The js extensions are fantastic. It's a real shame there is little (no?) documentation to help people get started.

Yes. Exactly that. Thanks.

I think this is currently a big missed opportunity for Gnome 3. The ability to extend the shell using JS is huge and the project has done a terrible job publicizing it. I was just googling around for it and had fairly hard time finding good, official docs on how to build an extension... If they dialed that in and got the GitHub crowd excited, they'd have a vibrant community in little time.

EDIT: Wow. The one click install from Chrome and auto activation is really nice. I clicked the link, approved the extension install (system dialog) and, BOOM!, pretty charts and graphs!

Wow! I had no idea there were so many extensions available already. I had kind of assumed Gnome 3 was so young that none were available yet.

They definitely should publicise these more.

I actually filed a bug a while back about the annoying Alt-` behavior: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=661119 . The AlternateTab extension (https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/) has matured a lot since it was first released, and it now fulfills my needs, so perhaps you should take a look at it, too.

Does it do focus-follows-mouse (AKA, sloppy focus) right?

EDIT: I'm speaking from my experience with Unity, where you could enable sloppy focus with the gconf-editor, but it caused various kinds of wigging out and wonkiness with Unity (probably why there's no easy way to enable sloppy focus).

I tried gnome 3 for a few minutes once, and got the feeling it would probably have similar problems with focus-follows-mouse, and that's probably why there's no easy way to enable it there either.

I'm not sure what you mean by the "right" way, but it doesn't do focus-follows-mouse by default, I don't think. You can use Gnome Tweak Tool (https://live.gnome.org/GnomeTweakTool/) to enable it, though.

    gsettings set  org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences focus-mode 'sloppy'

I use focus follows mouse and it works pretty great. There are a few circumstances where Openbox's focus follows mouse mode is more finely tuned (for instance, when un-maximizing a window, the window under the cursor receives focus instead of keeping it on the window that you just unmaximized); overall it works really well.

One thing the gnome3 guys are doing is putting application menu stuff up in the task bar (window-specific menus will remain in the app window), but when focus-follows-mouse is enabled, the app-menu will remain in the menu-bar instead of up in the panel.

Sometimes new version is actually better and the uproar is just resistance to change (which is 100% understandable and legit). Other times the uproar is the result of resistance to change combined with the fact, that the new version is actualy worse. It's hard to distinguish between these two.

Gnome Shell feels overdesigned. I just can't used to it. It draws too much attention to itself instead of getting out of the way. Classical Win7/Gnome2-like panel + exposé would be much better.

This is interesting, because my impression was completely opposite. Gnome Shell hides all unnecessary visual clutter (panels, menus, launchers, indicators, desktop icons) leaving just a simple monochromatic bar on the top. It's hard to come up with a design cleaner than that.

I do like a great deal of Gnome Shell, but what they very badly broke is when you have more than one of a certain window. I always have several terminals, and on my dual screen desktop have two browser windows, two emacs windows, two eclipse windows (one on each screen).

Gnome Shell really doesn't help in that scenario, nor does Unity when I tried it. (And Unity's app menu is obnoxious.) A taskbar has been the best UI solution found so far, although hopefully someone can improve on that.

The people most likely to be seriously inconvenienced by the poor multiple window handling are the ones most likely to be able to moan about it.

Gnome 3.4 doesn't let you use Gnome Shell with the "classic" Panel they provide. More annoying for me is if you use a classic session and try to put a panel on the left then it draws the text vertically which is almost unreadable. Modern screens have far more horizontal space available so why won't it go wider and draw horizontally?

Alt-` allows you to switch between windows of a single app, or you can install an extension from http://extensions.gnome.org that will give you the old style of Alt-tab behavior again.

I don't use keystrokes to switch between windows. I look at the list of the windows in the "taskbar" and directly click on the one I want. However I do use keystrokes to switch workspaces.

Switching from a current emacs to the 6th terminal window isn't particularly practical for me using keystrokes (ymmv). I also drag and drop items in the taskbar so they are in the order that makes sense for me.

I gave up on extensions because they kept breaking, and of course the moment there is a gnome version change they all stop working.

Fair enough. I generally tend to use something like tmux or multiple tabs in a single terminal window, or two windows at maximum, so I can definitely understand the limitations for you there. Something that I have picked up from using a Mac at work is using the Super key to bring up the expose-like overlay to find the window I'm looking for if it's not just a quick alt-tab or alt-` away.

On my laptop I do use multiple terminal tabs because there is so much less screen area. When there are zero or one instance of a particular app/window then the expose like functionality in Gnome Shell is great.

As I mentioned it would be great to be able to use the panel for the many instance apps and shell for the single instance ones but that isn't an option with Gnome 3.4. With Gnome 3.2 that is how I was doing things, but the panel wasn't part of gnome and instead there were several done as extensions each with its own quirks and breakages.

I also don't use Gnome Shell on my laptop for battery savings instead opting for the panel without 3d effects and not using compositing in the window manager. I want as few CPU/GPU cycles as possible spent on the laptop.

Couldn't agree more.