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

[David L]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 8:28 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
<snip>
>
> Obsessively follow? All you had to do was install Fedora 12, 13 or 14
> and hit the 'GNOME Shell' button in desktop-effects.

I can't speak for other people, but when I tried gnome
shell in Fedora 13, it was just completely broken
(at least on my hardware) to the point that I couldn't
really even see what I didn't like about it.  And from what
I remember, it seemed a lot different from what I see
now on fedora 15 beta.  At the time, I attributed the problem
to bad 3D on my hardware and the fact that is was a really
early release.  It's only now that it's working well enough that
I can actually use it that I notice what I don't like about it.
Here are a few things that annoy me about gnome shell:

 - The panel on the top is mostly wasted space AFAICT and
   I haven't figured out how to add a custom launcher that my
   5 year old is used to.  Am I missing something?
 - After you've started one terminal shell and you try to start
   another one, it just brings you to the first one you started
   unless you right click and tell it to start a new shell.
 - After you finally figure out how to start a bunch of shells
   (or any kind of window I suspect), switching between
   workspaces is painfully slow (like a second or two).  And it
   doesn't have to even be switching from or to a workspace
   that has a lot of windows.  As long one workspace has
   a lot of open windows, it's really slow.
 - I have used multiple rows and columns of workspaces
   for like 17 years and every Linux windows environment
   I've worked with has had that capability.  I don't see a
   way to get many columns of workspaces in gnome shell
 - related to the last point, I have a tradition of organizing
   different things in different workspaces.  I work
   for three different companies and I dedicate rows to
   each company.  The right workspace is for email.  The
   left one is for vnc sessions into the company's server.
   The next one is for browsers, etc.  In addition to not having
   multiple columns of workspaces, the rows don't seem
   to even exist until I put a window in them.  So I can't
   get to row N until rows 1->N-1 exist.  Am I missing
   something or is it impossible get a fixed NxM grid of
   workspaces in gnome-shell?
 - Couldn't find an easy way to get focus follows mouse.
   Ended up having to use gconf-edit.
 - Wasn't obvious how to revert to fallback mode.  It's
   under system info... I expected system info to tell
   me things like processor type, etc, not be the place
   to configure 2D fallback mode.

The gnome3 fallback mode solves the speed problem
and I can get a workspace grid.

FWIW, here's the smolt profile that shows my video
card.  I assume gnome-shell is much faster on other
hardware, but it's pretty slow on this system:

http://www.smolts.org/client/show/pub_eac1ae65-2436-4ef5-9caf-cf4923b716e5

Cheers...

         David