Overall, I think that Gnome3 is sexy. The fancy graphics stuff is pretty neat, although I don’t think that it improves my productivity at all; in fact, it somewhat hinders it (IMHO). Not sure that Gnome3 is for me in its current state, but I’m sure that it will get better in time.

THINGS THAT I DON’T LIKE ABOUT GNOME3/Fedora15:
- Can’t seem to customize a menu launcher; for instance, if I want for Terminator to open at a specific size (terminator –geometry 775×500), I was unable to find a way to change the properties of the launcher.
- MoCp and some other software that I like is not available for Fedora 15 through repos.
- Terminator only displays transparency when in full screen mode; background is black if the window is not expanded to full screen.
- I could not find an option to minimize a window, only maximize; you end up with a bunch of stacked windows since you cannot minimize anything that’s open.
- The default bar across the top of any window is really thick/wide/tall; takes up too much screen real estate.
- Sometimes extra software gets installed that I don’t want… not just libraries that are dependencies, but actual usable software; this seems to be the case mostly when installing KDE related software. Sure, if I install a KDE app, I can expect to install relative KDE library files, but I didn’t ask for a bunch of other KDE applications to be installed.
- Cannot switch between desktops with the mouse (as with Gnome2 using the panel switcher); you have to use keystrokes; this is not always convenient.
- Cannot create panel launchers; sure, you’ve got that nifty “favorites” menu on the left, but wouldn’t it be easier to click a button that’s at the top of your panel to open a favorite application rather than have to access the favorites bar and then select your desired application?
- The printer configuration in Fedora15 was not able to locate my network printing services. The user interface was less intuitive to me than the Ubuntu equivalent.

Anyway, here are my 2 cents about Fedora 15:
GNOME http://linuxblog.darkduck.com/2011/05/fedora-15-with-gnome-3-better-than.html
KDE: http://linuxblog.darkduck.com/2011/05/fedora-15-kde-when-new-old-is-better.html

But I don’t see anything distinctive about Gnome 3 – except that it requires hardware 3D graphics capability. MS Windows V1.0 had tiled windows so they’re certainly not new. And there are NetBook-like aspects of the G3 desktop.

Back in the 1930s, a gentleman named Dvorak came up with an English language keyboard key layout that allowed for more efficient typing. But it never took hold because of the costs of retraining and retooling. I can see that individuals may choose to adapt to the changes in Gnome 3. But what about the (too few) companies that use desktop Linux?

Personally, I have now taken it off my laptop now as I don’t like the Fedora package management and all the crap they add to the install.

I will probably now wait until the 3.2 release later this year to try this out for real on either Arch or Debian. Just hope a few more distro’s have a Gnome 3 release by then.