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Do we laugh or cry? It's like KDE and Gnome are in some sort of frantic struggle for who can botch desktop Linux the most.

I hope some commercial company like Google puts grownups to work like they did with Android on some replacement for these two basketcase projects.

80% percent of the tour looks like stuff in the current gnome. I mean we already have a NetworkManager and you already get a calendar when you click on the clock.

Virtual desktops get more recognition. The UI is more modal and Mac like. So what if their default configuration has just the one panel? Thats how I configure it anyway.

Yeah, lots of people will be in an uproar! There are millions of problems with Gnome 3! For starters, it won't be enough like KDE 3, so everyone will think it's broken when there's really no problems with it!

This isn't what I'm missing in Gnome. I'm missing desktop sharing and conferencing software like Livemeeting. I'm also missing some ease-of-use dealing with very simple things like cutting and pasting a link to a windows share and using it to look at a remote directory without having to edit all the slashes.

Instead, some *person* for want of a better word, thinks I need to have yet another new way to select the same applications, wants to "improve" (i.e. remove the choice from) the task list to be *more* application-centric (so retrograde it's laughable).. What a waste of time. What about an Object-Oriented or task-oriented desktop? How about some *actual* innovation? Being force-fed this kind of thing is pretty unpleasant;.

...but from an Ubuntu scheduling perspective this sounds like good news. The last thing Ubuntu needs for its next LTS release (10.04) is a big new jump to GNOME 3. It'll be nice to have an LTS that will let less bleeding-edge users wait until GNOME 3 has a year and a half of polish, integration, and (most importantly) actual user feedback to upgrade, while still retaining full support

Plus, it'll be just plain interesting to see how Mark Shuttleworth reacts to this frankly rather iffy-looking overhaul. (Oh well, so much for not commenting about it.) Although let's be nice - the screenshots in the link seem to be design mockups, while in the actual screencasts they seem to have solved the billions-of-elipses problem.

• I have two applications A and B in different workspaces
• Drag app A to the same workspace as app B
• Workspace shows B
• Click on A in the task bar (window list)
• Application A minimises. I expect it to come to the front.

It looks like the task bar is missing. It looks like you have to click more to get where you want to go. It looks shiny. If I wanted all that I'd go to windows. Maybe I will. Windows 7 isn't bad at all. Hopefully when 3.0 IS released it will be customizable to get it back to where it was!

Imagine you were looking to buy a new car. Going to a dealership, you are presented with a sedan that is marketed as "redefining the way drivers interact with their automobile." Getting behind the wheel, you discover that standard conventions like the steering wheel, turn indicator, gear shift, accelerator and brake pedals have all been replaced with New and Improved devices that the salesman assures you are so much Better.

Would you buy the damned thing?

I'm sick and tired of coders who pretend they are cognitive psychologists or ergonomics experts.

Just implement a standard GUI using normal conventions. Anything more and people like me will either find ways to turn the bullshit off, or we'll avoid using your product.

Microsoft is about to learn this the hard way with their new bullshit replacement for the task bar.

The idea of designing a new approach to the desktop is commendable and shows one of the advantages of open source. If people doesn't like it they can switch to other alternatives. The idea of making it work well is also a positive innovation on some well established practices of both the FOSS and proprietary camps.

However there are for sure some strange things in this Gnome Shell.

• The absence of the task bar will puzzle a lot of people used to it since Windows 95 (but I had no problems working without it on X Terminals before then) so removing it is a very bold and risky decision.
• I cannot understand why the clock is so important to be in the middle of the top bar. Considering how many times one needs to know the time and how many times one needs to do something else, hiding it into a corner looks just right. Maybe there is a need to fill the top bar after having removed all the open application icons/names from it. It surely has to look bare and empty.
• I also don't understand why is so important to show the name of the current application. Another way to fill all that empty space in the bar? But it if is so empty maybe the right thing to do is to remove it and leave only an Activities button to the left and the icons and clock to the right. That leaves more useful space for the applications and vertical space is always precious.
• Some people will really get sick when the screen moves so much every time they open the menu. This interface may be not for everybody.
• The Plus button to add new desktops uses up so much space (it takes a whole bottom bar with it) that it hints that a lot of people actually use multiple desktops. I do, but are they really so popular?

On the positive side, the large Activities menu could be very useful on the forthcoming generation of touchscreen computers because it provides a larger target for fingers than the menu items we have now. It reminds me a lot of the interfaces used by some Linux distributions for netbooks it is seems good. Maybe it's not so handy for computers that only have a mouse (too much travel).

Finally I hope that the top bar can be moved to the bottom because I just hate top bars. They are placed right where my eyes look by default but they are the less important piece of information on the screen. Apple made it totally wrong IMHO and MS improved their design, maybe the only time they did it.

So, I'll be using Gnome Shell in its present form? Maybe I'll give a try but I bet I'll soon switch to something else, back to Gnome 2 if I can. Other desktops I so for Linux look to much like Windows, something that cannot be good considering all the years I had to use it and never liked the way it worked.

I'm seeing this kind of "MMO style" user interface more and more, where the desktop becomes more and more obscured by locked down immovable user interface elements. I've gotten used to the task bar on Windows and the Menu Bar on the Mac and the Panel, I can deal with that, there's one box and it's pretty small and I can stuff everything into it... but Microsoft keeps turning menus into big obtrusive blocks (ribbons and sidebars and the start panel and so on) and this new Gnome scheme seems to be putting this horrid scheme on steroids.

No, no, no, ten thousand times, no.

My experience with *inexperienced* users always shows one thing that no Desktop GUI seems to have addressed/solved yet: the User who does not care whether the program they want is already running or not, they just want to use it. At the moment you look to see in one area if, say, you have a web browser already running and if not then you start one. This is one step too many. The User should just have one button to press per app and then the GUI decides whether to simple bring an existing app window to the front, or start the app for the first time. (Some programs play well with multiple startups, others do not.)