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I tried Gnome Shell again 2 days ago with the 3.6 release.

You can't configure it without an absurd number of extensions, the default interface makes me want to punch kittens, and it wiped my groups policy and network profiles so I am still trying to repair my startup procedure, and right now I need to manually start network-manager each time.

I won't blame that necessarily on Gnome Shell though. I will say I don't care how speedy it is, I can't use it for anything in its default state, and after a couple hours trying to get enough extensions to make it manageable, I just gave up. If I want a Gnome 3 desktop I'll use Cinnamon.

The only plus for Gnome Shell is that the system + search syntax that I love from many modern desktops works, but it also works in Unity (albeit slowly) and Cinnamon (albeit not as well, Cinnamon doesn't intelligently reorder results, it just lists them alphabetically).

This isn't meant to be a retort - I agree that there is a lot of mess in deb-ubu/gnome 3. But if you have the time, try fedora on bare hardware to get an idea of how gnome is supposed to work. You probably won't want to stick with it for a variety of legitimate reasons, but the core ui feel is very, very nice - and that's what I wish I could get under ubuntu.

I've used Gnome Shell on the last two releases of Fedora. I've grown to be comfortable with it but the idea of having to rely on multiple(9 in my case) extensions to get to that state is too much. Couple that with having to worry if extensions will be updated to work with each new release of Gnome. I had been interested in Cinnamon but was under the impression it was the distinguishing feature of Linux Mint. Cinnamon is now available for several distributions including Fedora(yum install cinnamon). For me, Cinnamon is what Gnome Shell should have been and I have no problem recommending it.

I still have a bad feeling about how the Mint team have been actively forking every GTK3 project Gnome has. Especially when they forked Nautilus into Nemo, I really feel like they should have gone with Thunar or Marlin. Maybe they should have also opted to try unifying under XFCE and fixing gtk3 to work with it instead of just forking Gnome Shell.

I dunno, I just feel like the direction of "fork everything even when alternatives with our same mindset exist" seem like a waste of effort.

The alternativees aren't GNOME, and many liked GNOME until very recently. (Well, it's been a year or 1.5 now, I guess, from the end-user perspective. Longer in development, I guess.)

It seems like Mint is trying to execute a hostile takeover of GNOME. Of course, GNOME is free software and forkable, and branches aren't necessarily subservient to the lines they branch from, so "takeover" means "establish a reputation as the highest-quality fork"

If the majority of the community begins to respect and support Mint as a better GNOME than the current stewards of GNOME, and Mint "rescues" the good majority of the GNOME software, we can jettison the old GNOME management, welcome the migration of contributors from old GNOME, and carry on.

The switchover is a huge mess of confusion, though.

XFCE is kind of gnome. Built off gtk2 and all. It was never mainline super integrated gnome, and it replaced a lot of dumb shit you didn't need to rewrite (see: the fudging calculator, the terminal emulator, etc) but I still feel like Cinnamon / XFCE should be in the same camp. They want the same thing, after all.

I ran Verne for a bit in a vm and live cd, but the Ubuntu Software Center has a convenience factor for Humble Bundles and since it is being targeted by a lot of Linux adoption such as Steam I'm kind of platform locked to it now.

I still run Arch as my side distro for having a machine I'm prouder of. Upstart can suck it.

I always thought Unity was all right in general, Compiz in particular has a wealth of functionality that just doesn't exist yet in Gnome3. The Unity dock is very good, particularly the way it deals with multiple application windows (broadly: first click: bring LRU to front, second click: expose all application windows).

But I still think the "Lenses" thing is just awful. It's fine for starting a specific application by typing in the name (the most basic "Quicksilver" functionality). It used to be really slow, but I think that's better now. It still sucks for application discovery, which the old hierarchical menu excels at. And the other lenses are mostly just silly: you've got this simplistic interface, and people are trying to shoehorn all kinds of use cases into it. Look at [0] and [1]. Some of those would be much more useful if they weren't limited by the restrictions of the Lens framework (others are just hopeless).

Fortunately the lenses are easy enough to ignore.

[0] http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/01/10-unity-lenses-scopes [1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/38772/what-lenses-for-unity-a...

I'm giving Unity another shot these days and it's still frustrating me. I still find it significantly less convenient than the old Gnome 2 was, and that's after tweaking some of the more annoying offenders (simple Alt press bringing up a huge window).

For example, the "expose" feature shows a bunch of windows and lets you browse between them with the arrows. However, the lowered the contrast between them so much that I really have no idea which window I'm currently selecting.

Similarly, multiple windows barely show which is in focus due to this weird fetish for near 0 contrast.

Also, I'm still missing my task list, wanting to know what I've been using to remind me where I stand in each desktop. The little arrows are much less helpful.

When pressing winkey, it waits something like a whole second before it shows me the unity-bar's numbering, and without those, the keyboard is useless. I use the keyboard to work faster, not slower, but Unity is slowing me down here as well.

These are just the criticisms off the top of my head, but overall it's been a pretty annoying week or so with Unity.

I noticed the lag with pressing the super key in unity, as well. Then I found out that Super+a is apps, Super+m is music, etc and that anyone of those is usually faster in coming up than a pure Super (for the default lens or whatever). I'm wondering if it's "waiting" just a bit for that +[a,m,etc]...

That can't be it. That would only require waiting until you release the Super key. Instead Unity waits about half a second after releasing the super key before the dash appears.

How do I switch from Unity to Gnome Shell in Ubuntu? (12.04)

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-gnome-desktop

be aware that this isn't a great user experience - a number of ubuntu specific features will work poorly or not at all while you're logged in under gnome shell, and several gnome 3 desktop integration features also won't be working. It's mostly fixable, but very much a trial and error experience.

Can installing Gnome Desktop break something in Unity?

I.... don't think so. It's hard for me to remember for sure, but if it did it wasn't anything big.

Make sure you also check out Gnome Shell's killer feature : extensions.gnome.org

I wish there were an amazing guide for building these shell extensions somewhere. I tried to look for some and couldn't find any that really got into the details.

I am what would be called a "Power User", I have used Linux for years, from Slackware to Arch Linux, and DE/WM from KDE to DWM.

I tried GNOME Shell twice, once with Fedora 15 and 3.5 in Arch Linux: I couldn't use it for more than a couple of hours, it was painful.

I just finished installing Ubuntu 12.10, and I must say that I like Unity, I like the global menu: I like the direction Canonical is taking.

For me, the problems with Ubuntu are the Repos/Apt which I dislike and are somewhat broken: And mainly the Community, which is not as helpful as the Gentoo community for example.

The global menu, meaning the Mac-style menu bar at top? That works without Unity.

I don't like the design of Unity, but I put up with it for a simple reason - it's been working stable without crashes here from the start. As long as they keep that I'm fine and hope they improve the rest over time.

I've read and have been told this issue is due to issues with video drivers and performance. I never bothered to try and fix it since playing around with video drivers is painful.

That is completely accurate in the same way that a slow truck delivering eggs packaged in solid lead cartons can be said to have a horsepower problem.