Questions for deployments of GNOME

How anyone can say that enhanced their productivity is beyond me, I've never seen so much clutter in my life.

A simpler system may minimize the initial configuration cost, but you pay for it with the decreased productivity that comes from using a duller, less suitable tool for the task at hand. In fact, the longer you use it, the more expensive it gets, since the cost accumulates. And the wider the adaptation that such a system achives, the more costly it gets, since there are now more users suffering accumulating productivity losses.

For example, I use the Gimp a lot for 3 or 4 days a month. I tend to keep the main window in the upper-right corner of the workspace. My window manager allows me to maximize windows along the y-axis, which allows me to create a new image, which opens a new window, which I can quickly maximize along the y-axis, move flush with the main window by relying on edge resistance (another feature that my window manager supports), and dragging the left border to the edge of the screen. This is complex to describe, but the combination of verticle maximization, edge resistance, and central window placement makes it easy to quickly maximize my use of available space, which is important if I am going to do this a couple hundred times a day.

Occasionally I am forced to work on a system that has only metacity installed, the operation described above becomes awkward -- and after just a few iterations -- irritating. Even if I am going to be working on said system for just one day, I usually find it more productive to download sawfish and configure it before I start. Even if I only break even from a time standpoint, it's worth it just to avoid the aggrevation.