The GNOME project at 15

I think you missed the point of what I was trying to say. If you reread my post, you will see that I'm trying to show a pattern of Gnome 3, where developers have either:

- broken long standing UI concepts
- applied wrong UI concepts to essentially a desktop OS

When I say "nobody is listening", I mean, nobody that is part of Gnome development group is providing a way out of these errors.

So, when you say in your reply that many things are configurable in relation to windows minimisation (and other things) - that is completely beside the point. There, I was really just pointing out, as a sidenote, that on a system where trivial customisations like rearranging of icons in impossible, somebody found it necessary to provide an option for a concept that has been all but butchered. The irony.

Window minimisation was a long standing concept, familiar to practically all desktop users. Gnome 3 introduced a soup of some of that stuff, but none of it is consistent or makes sense (as a metaphor of what is supposed to be happening when windows are minimised). Same with workspaces - from a clear concept, Gnome 3 went to ad-hoc visual hacks. Same with basic customisation. From clear and understandable drag-and-drop, Gnome 3 went to writing Javascript. And so on and so forth.

You may say that these things are my opinion. Maybe you see them that way. But it is a fact that many other desktop OSes (including previous versions of Gnome) use these concepts. And for a reason - users have been familiar with them for years and they work. Gnome 3 decided to break them, for reasons best described a "philosophical".