I think you must be an optimist: They're no *less* evil than television networks, newspapers or Slashdot. (TV shows are sold to TV networks, i.e., the TV show is the product.) When organizations like this are private they (potentially) *can* retain the goals of their founders, but once they're public (and they're founders sell off their stock), they're *required* to try and make the biggest profit possible. They do this by selling certain demographics of eyeballs to certain advertisers. The user's attention is the product.

Ah. Finally managed to track that down. I guess most of the stuff they're removing is stuff I either rarely or never use. I'm sure if one installed the Nautilus fork Nemo it would play nice with the rest of the GNOME desktop.

I guess I expected more from /. . Somehow I remember the desktop/editor/distro flamewars being a bit more technical in nature. Maybe that's just me looking at the past with rose colored glasses. Either way, it makes me feel old.

Heh. So the GNOME haters are going to host an indefinite protest to try and drown out any GNOME-related discussion in verbal noise? Well that sounds super mature. The whole GNOME3 thing is a textbook case of the GPL serving one of its intended purposes: Letting the users fork the code if they don't like the direction the project is going. That happened. The fork is called Mate. There's no need for any more animosity.

A lot of the hate seems to be grudges still left over from 3.0. It's probably going to take a really long time for people to give it another chance.

... while also creating a very nice, slick, and minimalist workflow. Now almost every feature that was removed is either back in core (albeit adapted to the new desktop), available as an extension or as an option in gnome-tweak-tool. Now I'd understand if people were complaining about still missing feature XYZ or saying how the new workflow is less optimal than the old one for managing windows, but that's not what's happening. Instead there's a whole bunch of people who seem to take any GNOME article as a chance to complain loudly without citing any specifics and mention how they switched to something entirely different without even mentioning what it does better. That's why I characterized the complaints as "someone moved my food dish." No content, just barking.

Sorry for calling you a troll. There's just a lot of noise in this thread from GNOME3 haters and a total lack of specifics. It seems like most people have decided they hate GNOME3 and not much can change their mind. About removing functionality from the core for people to re-add as extensions: I have mixed feelings about that myself. That aside most of what you're looking for is definitely available as extensions if you do decide to try GNOME again:

Looks like Frippery Bottom Panel would do the trick.

Axe menu looks awesome and I actually use it myself. There's also Frippery menu which looks more minimalist.

Yeah. Agreed there, but it's getting better. It's just that instead of applets they're extensions now, and they're not installed by default.

Are you referring to the double-pane thing that they borrowed from mc that they recently removed?

And it would be worth having a big argument over, except that there's a relatively friendly app that can be used to install and change themes. I actually think that's a pretty reasonable choice on their part: Keep the themes out of their basic, streamlined config tool and let power users play as they see fit.

It really won't behave well unless it can use hardware 3D acceleration, so keep that in mind when choosing a hypervisor.

There really is a lot of "OMG! Someone moved my food dish" going on. The move from ed to vi must have really shook them up as well. _

I generally agree and I'm hopeful they'll get things figured out better as time goes on. In the meantime, gnome-tweak-tool can be used to turn extensions on and off and install new ones.

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