I used to do the exact same thing re: the desktops, but as I said, I kept just popping up terminals on the screen I was on until I'd made a total mess of it. The interesting thing about gnome 3's system is that switch desktop only switches the main monitor unless you have a plugin installed, which means I now have right screen - what I'm working on now, left screen - all the other stuff (eg. email in one desktop, browser in another, music player in another). I normally have 6 or 7 open by the end of the day. Then after changing a few keyboard shortcuts, I can flip between them as needed.

The cool thing about the above is that you can drag a window into the left monitor as a sort of holding pen so you can switch the other desktop and keep that window on screen. So if something comes up in my email that needs me to check something on the web, I open the email into a new window, drag it to the right screen, then switch the left to the browser. It's a different approach, but once I was used to it I didn't want to go back. Incidentally, I came from KDE 4 which I'd used since KDE 2, with a brief spell using ION 3 which I quit when the author started acting like a dick :-)

would it be possible for this post to contain responses which don't just say which desktop they're using instead? I don't bounce on the mate posts and say HAHAHAHAHA MATE IS SHIT, I'M USING GNOME 3!!! honestly, get over it. If mate makes you happy, then stop whining and use it. I was hoping to read some interesting stuff about what's actually in 3.6 here. that "offtopic" flag is being seriously underused here.

I actually really like Gnome 3, but hate Unity. Go figure :-) I never used icons on my desktop anyway (there's windows in the way.. it's a silly place to put them), I stuck with the auto-new-desktop feature and now use it far more efficiently than just having 4 where I kept putting windows onto the wrong desktop and ended up not being able to find the damn thing (gnome forces you to spend a couple of seconds planning where to put stuff, which saves you time/confusion in the long run), and I cannot live without focus-follows-mouse, which ubuntu has not only removed, but made virtually impossible to put back without buggering up the menus.

How is this insightful? It was inevitable that the first comment on here would be an unhelpful "WAAAH, I DON'T LIKE GNOME" comment. To be insightful, it would need to contain something we've not seen over and over and over again.

you end up getting spammed but for stuff you actually need.

Like a mortgage, or some hot share tips.

I've never clicked that...

I always wanted an 'Unsafe search' option.

You want to be careful with that on image search. I once did a search, admittedly for pedobear cartoons, and some actual child porn came up. I was at work. You've never seen the ctrl-w button being hit so bloody fast. (and yes, I did report it to the IWF later).

either that, or he likes to check his email while he's at it.

I'm upping the ante to a six monitor configuration as opposed to the current two.

Just project it onto your neighbour's wall.

Slow down, some people are into that!

sometimes you just accidentally hit the wrong key, and a Justin Bieber video pops up. It's virtually impossible to finish one off to Justin Bieber. Not impossible I might say, just difficult.

because people have different interests

I once fixed someone's computer and found his porn stash on there (it wasn't exactly well hidden). There was gigabytes of it... ALL of which was facial cumshots. Definitely a clear interest in that one.

Then Mo stole his idea and became famous, right?

It could be more in tune with getting people to interact with their computers more. I recently had this conversation with my mother:

"why didn't you just click that?"
"I've never tried that button"
"why not?"
"I didn't know what it does"
"that's all the more reason to try it"

John Lee, chairman of the UK's Balloon Association

John, if a girl asks you what you do for a living, just tell her you're an accountant.

"180k-Year-Old Mutation Allowed Humans To Become Vegetarians, Move Out of Africa" is a statement, followed by an order to move out of africa. Honestly, is it that hard to type two extra characters and turn the comma into an 'and'?