Well, I've tried GNOME 3 now...

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2011-04-21 at 18:07 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> ...and my current theory is that GNOME 3 was funded by Dell
> computers so when people hurl their computers off the highest
> cliffs they can find and have to buy new ones, Dell profits
> will go up :-).
> 
> As others have noted, there seems to be a lot of things that
> you have to just know the magic keystrokes to find (hold down
> Alt, hit ESC, etc),

This is the case with pretty much any desktop. They're fundamentally
sufficiently complex that you can either have very discoverable (but
inefficient) or efficient (but not so discoverable), and all desktops
I've ever seen end up being a mix of the two. The difference here is
that some of these are _new_ and hence you have to learn stuff and
everyone hates learning.

>  but the one keystroke that has been
> traditional forever is hitting F1 for help, but alas, there
> is no help, so the hope of discovering the mysteries of
> GNOME 3 by actually reading the online help was dashed.

http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/

> When I first logged in and started poking mysterious stuff
> with sticks to try and make something happen, I found a
> menu for all the programs I could run (a hideous one that filled
> my entire 46 inch screen, but at least a menu). I used it
> to start a terminal, but never found it again. Apparently
> you can only use the menu once.

Go to overview, click 'Applications'. But what you probably want to do
is go to overview and type a bit of the name (or description) of
whatever it is you're looking for.

> There are a slew of mysterious cryptic icons at the top
> right of the screen, but nothing seems to have any tooltips,
> so they remain mysterious.

You could try just clicking on them. From left, they are accessibility,
volume control, bluetooth (if you have it), network, user menu.

> My only real question now is how fast I can install the bits
> I need to switch to my normal fvwm based X session and never
> look at GNOME 3 again.

You could try just learning a bit about it before writing it off
forever.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net