All in all, I think it is quite solid. Currently I use Fedora 18 for most of my workstations, but just updated my home desktop to Fedora 19 and notice they have the "GNOME Classic" option, which is essentially a beefed up version of the fallback mode. If you prefer GNOME 2.x, take a shot at installing Fedora 19 or 20 if you like to live on the edge. Login to the GNOME Classic session (click the sessions button in the login screen) and try it out. I think you might actually like it.
As an eternal sceptic of new things tech who really didn't much care for GNOME 3.x at first, I've actually fallen in love with it. Can't say I have any issues at all other than it doesn't do amazing with 9 monitors, but how many OSS devs have setups like that ;D
a) How did you manage 9 monitors? b) Any good solution to moving windows to the next/previous/up/down monitor?
For moving the windows, I drag them. It isn't that difficult.
On my laptop with Radeon HD 3200 using the open source drivers (from Fedora 19) it's hardly usable and spins the hell out of the fans.
Thanks god for MATE.
The Radeon drivers must be terrible.
I also sit twenty feet from the the lead radeon driver developer, so I'll ask him tomorrow if there's anything we can do to help him out.
For my purposes, GNOME 3 lets me easily dedicate workspaces to different tasks, it lets me easily open as many terminals and Vim windows as I like, and it lets me easily open two windows side-by-side (an editor with code and a terminal for running tests, or an editor with HTML and a browser for previewing, etc.) so I'm pretty pleased with it.
I'm a little worried about some of the changes GNOME 3 has gone through; as it migrates from traditional in-window menu-bars to a single button in the global bar at the top of the screen, that's probably going to put a crimp in my sloppy-mouse-focus habits. This new "header bars" concept probably isn't going to play very nicely with my custom title-bar-button-order setup (I prefer the traditional Mac close-at-top-left, zoom-at-top-right configuration). Still, I'll probably get used to it over time.
I was recently working on a Gnome 2.x machine and couldn't believe how terrible and difficult to use it all seemed – even though I used 2.x for many years.
I'm not sure where all the Gnome 3 negativity came from. But I understand that a small detail can be enough to derail your experience with it. In my case, that would be the "Launch new instance" behaviour: clicking on the launcher focused on the existing instance, instead of creating a new one. But with a tiny gnome shell extension it was resolved. I have other extensions installed, but that's really the only one I want to keep.
I think the flak and hate they received was disproportionate… But then, pretty much the same happened with KDE3->KDE4, Win2k->WinXP, WinXP->Vista, Win7->Win8, and more recently with iOS6->iOS7. About the only time where a major UI change was introduced without too much trouble, was the MacOS9->MacOSX Public Beta transition; but I suspect there was just as much grumbling from the people on OS9, it just may have been that their voices got drowned out by the excitation of the new users attracted by the new "lickable" interface.
Gnome 3.0 "stable" was like an alpha product and it's hard to have the (ex) users forget a negative experience.
Disclosure: I'm sympathetic with today's Gnome but the Gnome 3.0 mess made me an happy XMonad user
Things like deciding for me that I can't place items on the desktop. It's my desktop - if I want to put things there and 'clutter' it, then I should be able to.
Things like having a file manager that requires modifier keys to send things to the trash. Not delete them outright, just send them to the trash. If I fat-fingered something, then I still have the safety net of being able to pull it out of trash - it's the whole point of trash.
Then there's trying to get a Windows user to shift to linux with Gnome. "How do I..." You can't. "Oh, then how do I..." You're not permitted to. Yes, I know I said linux gives you much more control, but... ...and so we have one less linux user as she returns to an OS she can personalise beyond a background colour.
Gnome3 is too much about form and not enough about function, and makes the rather insulting assumption that the average user is pretty dumb. Is gnome 3.10 nicer than previous gnome 3's? Sure. Is it nicer than a traditional desktop? Not in my experience.
Gnome GUI still creeps through of course, and generally does the trick, although lack of drag & drop system wide is the single biggest fail whale design decision of the Gnome 2 to 3 transition, IMO (if anyone has drag & drop in Gnome 3 without a WM wrapper, chime in, will happily retract the claim if this is i3 specific).
I'd like to go with a Gnome-less stack when I upgrade to Fedora 19, but you know, Gnome, despite its warts does come with a ton of built-in convenience out of the box, so unless I find myself unemployed in the near future (i.e. with time on my hands), Gnome + i3 it will be (i3, BTW, is pretty much a wonder joy of awesome, no pun on that other WM intended).
Assume the same for other WMs
EDIT: Still requires editing your xmonad.hs to have it play nicely with GNOME, though.
Haven't had much luck getting gnome-shell-extensions running well. I got the weather one going by taking the one from the gnome site rather than the rpmforge package but system monitor, pomodoro timer and a couple of others aren't playing ball for me currently.
I have had to google how to do a bunch of different things since switching to it. I still don't know any commands except restart for the snazzy alt+f2 command overlay.
I'd most like it to add a apple key+space style search from the mac world.
Most interesting new app there is "boxes", a virtual machine / remote machine viewer / manager mashup thing. Looks quite promising to me.
1. Install freetype-freeworld from RPM Fusion
2. Get the Microsoft fonts like Arial, Times New Roman, and Verdana
3. Edit your ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf to contain the same XML under the section "Subpixel-hinting and Font-smoothing" here: https://wiki.debian.org/Fonts
A lot has improved since the first release, removed features came back, bugs were fixed, UI was tweaked. There are still some (stupidly) rough edges here and there that piss me off but you get used to them, wait for a fix, or use a shell extension.
Verdict: Buy (unless you want a tiling window manager)
What got me started on all those was that early Gnome 3 had major problems with multi-monitor, and in general lack of finish/configurability.
I am using Gnome 3.8 on Fedora 19 now, and it is great. I'm very productive in it, and in my opinion it's the most polished UI. I run a three-monitor setup and program mostly.
That said, I would have chucked it without gnome-tweak-tool. GNOME 3 has brought back some of the configurability it lacked originally. Personally I use it to set Sloppy window focus, turn off dynamic workspaces and set 4 static, and make keyboard shortcuts for just about everything.
As for command-line configurability, I run 'gsettings list-recursively | sort > gs-before.txt' before running gnome-tweak-tool and then after to compare to see what the settings names are. I then use that to create a 'post-install' config file so my changes are documented and if I reinstall I don't have to manually flip buttons. For example, to set sloppy window focus mode:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences focus-mode 'sloppy'
Anyway, so far so good with GNOME 3.8, and am looking forward to Fedora 20 and GNOME 3.10.
The best thing about it is also when it gets "a bit funky" it's as easy as "alt+f2 r" to fix it and have it running as good as new.
I'm not sure if the hypothesis is correct, but it seems that GNOME 3 is targeting the desktop market that Apple has so well-cornered and optimized. There are things that do not logically make sense, to me, within Mac OS X and subsequently GNOME 3, but just the same they are included in the desktop GNU/Linux initiative.
I'm not entirely convinced that this is the path forward.
Also keep an eye out on the extensions.
After you spent some time customizing it, I cant use any other WM that does not bring in this ease of customization.
After that, the WM gets out of your way.
I'm also OK with the Gnome maintainers removing the middle click behavior IFF they give me an extension to bring it back.
the power is "how" and not "what". If they can fix the theme manager of Gnome (I'm still stuck on Gnome 3.4 on 12.04, so I dont know), it will be great.
I'm imagining "Recipe Packs" in the future - one click sharing of your customized desktops. Who cares if the default is blue or red.
Felt like distro hopping again anyway, might as well try out the new Gnome while I'm at it.
Now I'm happy. Now I understand that trying to use it when it forces you to change your workflow is a terrible idea. I needed months to get used to the new desktop and a week to completely forget it.
So I guess I'm a Gnome 3 user without really using Gnome 3, if that makes any sense.
Edit: formatting
It's true some fine tuning is no longer easy to do and that the Gnome team makes some decisions I disagree with, but, all things considered, it works and stays out of the way.