GNOME 3 is the first desktop I've used in a long time that actually tries to do something fundamentally different and better, and, you know what? They've more or less succeeded. I'm glad to see the open source community actually try something different, interesting, and better.

Yes, GNOME 3 is wildly different from the traditional WIMP interface, but once I got used to it, I really think it's the best desktop experience I've had since my NeXTstation days.

Don't you mean Canonical and Unity bashing? Gnome is OK - it's Ubuntu that's the problem.

Probably not for much longer [linuxinsider.com] ... both the Internet and open surce have ways of routing around the damage.

My thoughts exactly.

It's not perfect -- far from it -- but it's better than the alternatives and seems to have a lot of momentum *in the right direction*.

X team, Thanks for all the hard work, but Gnome will just ruin it, because they have some crappy new interface changes they been working on and they insist that it be used instead of your efforts.

Yeah, but never mind the colors specifically, this is something I noticed a few years back and seems to be getting worse, Gnome at 1280x1024 now looks like it's only 640x480 because everything is so massive. Maybe it's related to the increasing age - and therefore long-sightedness - of the chief devs.

And when can I get wobbly windows back on GNOME3?

Problems:

1. I want to make changes that are difficult if not impossible
2. The mouse interface requires wild movements to go from one app to another
3. Probably other things too....

I can work in Gnome3. I can. I've used it enough that I can use it. I don't like it better than other things and I fail to see how it's better than other things. It's a lot of "get in your way of doing things" from where I sit. To add to item #3, getting to run your applications is a PITA when you have to do a "search all>search category" thing all the time. Menus are essentially the same thing but faster.

Gnome3 does a LOT to get in the way of the user accessing his applications. Gnome3 needs to get the hell out of the way.

As far as clones, my local Cult of Apple members spent a lot of time teasing me by placing the Gnome 3 "System Settings" panel side by side with the OS X "System Preferences" panel. I certainly could not defend against the assertion that that feature at least was a wholesale ripoff. Perhaps you could have done better. The categories are the same, the icons look the same, only difference in the end is that the OS X panel seems to offer more options for customization. If you're keeping score I wouldn't count that as a win for Gnome either....

It does reinforce my initial impression after reading about Gnome 3.4 that after trying to adapt to 3.2 has resulted in nothing more than a massive waste of time I could have otherwise spent being productive had I jumped ship immediately upon the first performance hits. The "one task at a time" idea makes me feel like I am performing surgery with ski-gloves on when doing image processing where you are constantly flipping between an image window and menus/terminals which manipulate it. On a 30" monitor I have been fighting how silly it seems that a terminal dragged too far up becomes a 30" wide terminal. It feels unnatural to have to check the motion of the terminal and drop it several tenths of an inch from the top bar, wasting as much space as I was supposed to be saving. I guess maybe it's supposed to be fun -- goof it up and it's just like the guy's nose buzzing in Operation. I used to be able to balance my thoughts using the desktop as a way to keep an overview of my various tasks in minimized windows or iconified desktop switchers (which to me functioned kind of like a heads-up-display) but in the new Gnome, out of sight is out of mind without hands on the keyboard. I tried, with an open mind, to get with the program on the advice of Gnome advocates and out of a loyalty to Fedora which I've used since RedHat 4. But after seven months it still doesn't feel right --it's awkward and keeps me from getting things done.

Now the user experience demands that applications start placing the menu on the top bar? I guess if you run one application at a time that's a strength but I don't nor can I. I see people worried about how sloppy focus pays a penalty for this happening and I believe you've just told me that this concern is a price you're willing to pay for a user experience. In essence this is a big warning that I will end up rewriting code if I wanted to stay with gnome. I was paid to write the code, I am most certainly not going to be paid to rewrite it. I am currently paid to produce with it.

YMMV obviously, but it's a warning I cannot ignore about what Gnome's future will mean for my work...

I agree with you but GNOME is taking a different approach than what you suggest. Instead of cloning Mac and moving everything to the top of the screen, it only moves application-centric functions there. For example, if you wanted to access your program's preferences dialog, you'd use the standardized "application menu" (no more hunting in "Edit" or "Tools" anymore!). If you wanted to zoom-in on your document, however, you'd use the "view" menu on the window itself because it only affects that window. From a glance this might sound like it makes searching for options even more confusing, but once this becomes standard it should be even easier than the current method.