Day: GNOME OS

Things like tablets are reaching parity with desktops and laptops in terms of performance and capabilities. Ideally they are not going to be locked down as much as they traditionally have been.

Also there are now more and more ways to interact with computers.

> By making a desktop environment that works well with touch-screens, they created one that works horrible with a mouse and keyboard

Mousing leaves a little bit to be desired, but Gnome 3 a hell of a lot more keyboard friendly then Gnome 2 was. A exponential improvement, IMO.

If you prefer to have window lists, static desktop choosers, start menus
and the like to make mousing friendlier they can be taken care of with extensions easily enough, although I hope that Gnome folks will address some of the current mouse limitations.

> I don't know many desktops with touchscreens, except for kiosks and the like.

Koisk and point of sales are big ones. Despite Linux popularity in embedded devices the Linux environment proved too problematic for these sorts of things as POS seems to be predominately XP POS (a actual microsoft product)

> The last thing I want to do is to mess up my monitor with fingerprints.

In practice it doesn't seem to be a problem except that touchscreens are miserable on desktops and laptops anyways. Nobody wants that.

A nice way to try out Gnome 3 on a tablet-like struction would be on one of those Mimo USB+touchscreen monitors, if/when they get the GPU offload stuff sorted out.