Why limit yourself to the X11 clients? I am perfectly happy with mutt (www.mutt.org). It is _fast_ (especially with local mail storage), does what I want it to do (I don't need calendar, for example), and can be used everywhere, including remote ssh session from my Android phone.
But it seems my requirements are different to what the OP needs.
Also, unrelated, but I feel like the GNOME 3 hate is really blown out of proportion. Sure, some users were driven away, but the exact same thing happened with GNOME 2 and people called it trash and crap and whatever else.
And they were right.
I have been using GNOME since GNOME 1 times, and I think for former GNOME users the GNOME 3 fiasco is not something unexpected, it is a logical outcome of the overall trend in GNOME development.
I remember Sawmill/Sawfish being replaced by Metacity, which even in the latest GNOME 2 releases was not able to do things which were supported in Sawfish since day 1 and still are.
I remember Galeon being pushed out of GNOME and replaced by Epiphany (seriously, did anybody used Epiphany?), and again, Galeon was more capable than Firefox (and of course than Epiphany, but no surprise here), until it bit-rotted enough to be removed from Fedora about year and half ago.
I remember GDM being rewritten for GNOME 2.20, omitting XDMCP support altogether (a display manager without XDMCP, would you believe that?) and removing the config file, in which the user previously could set his own X server options, allowing, for example, correct multi-seat support. Those features were promised to be added later, but they never were, with the notable exception of the XDMCP support. And guess what? GDM in GNOME 3 is said to support multi-seat, but it generates its own hard-coded xorg.conf for secondary seats somewhere under
So no, GNOME 3 has not been a surprise, at least for me. GNOME 3 has been a logical outcome of the general trend, which has been visible in the GNOME development for several years. That said, GNOME 2 was bearable for me for general use (with Galeon, xdm, and Sawfish). When GNOME 3 was released, I have finally switched to XFCE.
Today all of our apps are network transparent.
Sadly, this is not true anymore. Many apps today depend on things like D-Bus or PulseAudio, which cannot be easily forwarded through the X protocol connection. Add a "run only a single instance of $app no matter what" mentality to the mix, and you are screwed: the $app started on a remote machine detects that another instance (on a completely different machine but the same display) is running, and tries to forward its own command line arguments to the previously running instance. But arguments like filenames are depended on the X client machine. Oops.
Obligatory XKCD:
http://xkcd.com/538/
... Slashdot leaves CmdrTaco.
Same here. After almost 10 years with GNOME, I have migrated to XFCE for F15.
For former GNOME-2 user, XFCE provides almost the same experience: it is based on GTK, and their Terminal even is based on the same widget as gnome-terminal. I have kept my window-manager (sawfish), so the user interface is almost the same.
Unfortunately, in F15 the Galeon browser is no longer provided, so I had to migrate to Firefox, which is my biggest change in F15 from the UI standpoint. I will miss Galeon's smart bookmarks.
XFCE even supports the "desktop icons are minimized applications" mode (the default option is "desktop icons are application launchers") as the old window managers like twm or fvwm had.
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.