Yeah. Not having a built-in theming system totally killed OS X. GNOME should really take a lesson from ... oh wait.

I haven't used 3.6 yet, but I find 3.4 to be relatively friendly for dev work, especially with a couple extensions and a couple trips to gnome-tweak-tool. One of the nice parts is that it works really well without having to use a mouse very much. They adopted the OSX-style alt+` to switch between windows in a single app. Also, using type-ahead find to launch or switch to apps is nice.

I realize I might be falling for a troll here, but tell me what parts you consider batshit crazy and I'll tell you if I've found any extensions or options in gnome-tweak that might unbreak that for you. (Been using GNOME Shell for most of a year now)

Yup. I'm going to wait a bit for the themes and extensions I use to get updated for 3.6, but it's looking good so far. At this point it feels like pretty much all the functionality and options removed during the GNOME 2 -> 3 transition has been made available as an extension or exposed as an option via gnome-tweak-tool. Any favorite extensions that you can't live without? My favorites are:
- Axe menu extension (to put a nice "traditional" GNOME menu back in the top left)
- Maximus (to remove the titlebar on maximized windows) and Window Options (to make the window menu available from the panel)
- Tracker extension (to add file results to the type-ahead find search) and Journal extension (to add recent files to dock icon's right click menu)
- Calculator extension (to make the type-ahead find search perform calculations)

My current favorite theme is MediterraneanNight

Ubuntu is planning to release a GNOME "remix" called (wait for it) GNOMEbuntu in October. I'm still not sure if this will land alongside Ubuntu 12.10 or a bit afterwards, but it should be a very comfortable way to play with GNOME3 if you like apt.

I do something a bit different. I tend to put any admin tools up in an /admin directory (ex, https://example.com/admin/phpmyadmin), then use HTTP basic authentication to require users to authenticate with a username/password in our LDAP directory (but you could use local shell accounts as well). That way someone would need to first compromise a user account before they could even *start* trying to compromise one of the admin tools. I tend to think of it as a similar idea to not allowing remote root logins in ssh. Login first and sudo/su. I'm actually surprised that this isn't used more often. Am I missing an obvious security implication? Or is it just a case of people being lazy?

I'm a vegetarian (for ethical reasons) who doesn't buy leather or other products that come from killing an animal. I am totally *thrilled* with the concept of lab-grown leather and meat and I'm hugely looking forward to it. I think I'd be willing to pay a certain premium, especially as a once-in-a-while thing.

Bravo sir. I totally fell for it until the last sentence.

Autohide the top panel? There's an extension for that: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/208/panel-settings/
The big thing with GNOME 3 is that a lot of the settings moved out of the core and in their place, APIs were exposed to let people tweak things as they see fit with extensions.

You might want to look at something like the Axe Menu extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/327/axe-menu/
I think there's another menu extension too, but I can't think of it off the top of my head.

Want to change font sizes? Get gnome-tweak-tool
Vertical space wasted? Grab two extensions:
- Maximus: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/354/maximus/
- Window Options: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/353/window-options/

Extensions are probably the best kept secrets of GNOME Shell, which is sad because there are a ton of awesome extensions.

I'm actually looking forward to some of the GNOME 3.6 changes. Once I went out and grabbed some extensions ( http://extensions.gnome.org/ ) to tweak things more to my liking I really started to enjoy GNOME Shell. I was kinda hoping to wander into the comments here and talk to other Shell users about what they like and don't like and what extensions they use, but instead there's just this incredible hate-fest. Other GNOME 3.x users, what extensions are you using? There's like a million and I'm totally curious if I've missed some.

My top 5:
- Calculator (lets you type equations into the search bar)
- Weather (It's just a classy weather applet)
- Window Options (puts close/min/max options in the app dropdown menu on the top panel)
- Maximus (Removes the title bar of windows when maximized. Combines well with the 'Window Options' extension)
- Blank Screen (Adds a menu option to blank the screen without locking it. Puts the monitor in power saving mode)

Yeah, they had something even better than fascism: obscurity.

Another vote for rsync + simple wrapper script + cron + ssh keys. rsync is brilliant at coping with interruptions, it can guarantee that files match on client and server with checksums. It's fast, it's simple, supports restricting the amount of bandwidth it uses and it's easily scriptable. Wrap it in a shell script to detect failure and retry a certain number of times before informing the user (you). Make sure you setup ssh keys so it can run unattended. Feed the script to cron and tell it to attempt the transfer at some time in the middle of the night.

Bonus points for the wrapper script:
- Have your script detect available bandwidth and only use ~70% of it if you're actively using the computer at the time
- Setup a simple lockfile so that if you it's still running when it tries to run again it will give a useful error
- Maybe have it try once every 2 hours between 2AM and 6AM until it succeeds? (see point above about locking)

I'd be curious if other people are already doing similar things with the above tools.

In a pure democracy the people vote for *laws* not representatives. That's why the US is considered a Democratic Republic (or a *Representative* Democracy). It has nothing to do with the voting method and *everything* to do with what people get to vote for.