Tim,
Yeah, right. Slowly opening menus, slowly spinning desktop cubes, hover and wait before continuing, splash screens and other animations that delay me doing something "make it work better"?
Sam Varshavchik:
I agree. Having said that: if Gnome wants to target the power user, with the latest high-end video hardware, the kind who follows the latest UI trends, then I see nothing wrong with that, with Gnome becoming a boutique, specialty UI that targets a specific userbase.
It was possible to add those features without making the underlying system sluggish, it was done before. Now, you have a behemoth that you can turn off the whizzy bits, but still uses too much grunt to show the desktop in a basic manner.
Sadly, I expect that Fedora at some point will become exclusively Gnome and KDE, because only these stacks will support Wayland, in order to ditch X, and also target the same userbase. This won't happen anytime soon, but it will happen.
I'm still not convinced Wayland's a great idea. The old X had a ton of features that people wanted, but Wayland doesn't. *If* they reimplement them, how's Wayland going to be different from X? If they don't reimplement them, why would those people want to use it?