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

[mike cloaked]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 9:04 PM, Rahul Sundaram <metherid at gmail.com> wrote:
manager is a port of Metacity to Clutter    You call it tablet oriented
> but I dont think the UI will  work well on a tablet and GNOME developers
> haven't targeted it towards tablets either.   If you want to use a
> different DE or WM, go ahead.  That is a different discussion from a
> distribution default.

There are clearly strong concerns being voiced by a number of people
around the available functionality of Gnome3 as it stands today in its
current state of development.  It is clearly a learning curve but most
people are prepared to learn if the product is worthy of the time
needed to make that effort.

It seems to me that the complaints are not really that there is a huge
difference between the old and the new (they are of course very
different) but that the new does not allow the user to "do" certain
things that they could before - and if the things that a user wants to
do with the DE are part and parcel of normal daily workflow and it
can't be done in Gnome3 then that user will have to find an
alternative. Sometimes things can be done but in a way that takes more
time - and people will resist it if that is the case. In other cases
previously available functionality has no real equivalent in Gnome 3.

I am sure that  list could be compiled - but for example one thing
that for me is an absolute must-have is the easy ability to make an
icon (preferably in teh dash but could be on the desktop) that will
launch an application that is not in the default set, or an
application that has not been downloaded as a package - simple example
would be that I want to be able to run a nightly version of
Thunderbird and keep ahead of the released version in the rpm
packages.

Until now it has been easy to make a desktop icon that will refer to
the binary and execute it.  This is possible with some effort in
Gnome3 but is not entirely straightforward (making a .desktop file).
Until now it has been a few clicks and it's done. This functionality
is still a few clicks to make the icon in KDE4.6 as current.

This one piece of lost functionality alone may be enough to make me
switch to a different DE but everyone has their own thoughts.  Maybe
this will be added in at some point in the future of Gnome3 but if it
is not there when F15 is released then I will have to switch.

There may be other things too - like how easy is normal workflow and
running the day to day tasks on the desktop?  Is a normal (even if
different to what we are used to now) workflow possible for most
people with Gnome3 then it will remain used and popular - if not then
people will look for a DE which will allow an efficient normal
workflow.....

-- 
mike c