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

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 04/28/2011 02:18 AM, mike cloaked wrote
> 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.

So taking this one issue that you explicitly mention, it is unlikely to
influence desktop environment choices for the majority of users and if
some other desktop environment is more suitable for such users, why not
use that?  Every major version upgrade of a desktop environment
typically brings in a number of changes that users have to adopt to.  As
someone who has gone through the GNOME 1.x to 2.x transition or Linux
libc to glibc transition pains,  the problem it appears isn't that there
is a change or that there are some missing features which is true of
pretty much any major change.  The problem is that users who are used to
GNOME 2.x incremental updates process are not comfortable dealing with a
major change in their environment and likely don't feel the need for
it.  There are many ways of coping up with that but from a distribution
perspective,  we are just going to inherit those changes and push it out
as a release.  Expecting anything else to happen seems unrealistic.  
Incremental updates like GNOME 3.2 and further revisions including
various extensions would fill in the gaps in atleast some cases but I
honestly can't fault GNOME as a project for trying something different
after 9 years of pretty much the same UI.  

Rahul