Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users

That's patently false. Gnome Shell has problems, but not of that kind. In my opinion, they basically boil down to:

1. It requieres OpenGL 1.4 or later. That rules out half of my machines and all of my virtual machines.
2. It's less discoverable than Gnome 2. Finding how to close it, or how to unmount a pen drive is not trivial, as it should. As of 3.6, browsing installed applications is also harder.
3. The networking applet is "flakey". There are things that cannot be done with it, becomes annoying when moving out of WiFi range, and cannot successfully re-enable WiFi without rebooting.
4. Extensions tend to _crash_ the shell. And old extensions do not work properly.
5. It's not configurable. Aspects like colors, fonts, icon sizes, how dates and times are presented, etcetera should be configurable. The icon size in the applications list are absurdly big, for example.
6. It does not make good use of screen space on big monitors. On other desktops you can put toolbars and widgets on those extra pixels.
A similar list has been collected here: http://k3rnel.net/2011/05/01/why-im-sick-and-tired-of-gno...

Of course, there are also good ideas in there. Having everything about the desktop in a single view (the overview or "meta-desktop" as I like to call it) is a good idea. It means I just have to memorize a single keystroke to do many things. Very convenient. Feels like command mode in vi, but with the input line on top. I find it ironic that not much long ago, modal interfaces were greatly frowned upon.

I guess I will have to wait until 3.12 or 3.14 to feel it usable again.