Introduction

In June of 2011 I upgraded from Fedora 14 to Fedora 15 and found myself confronted with Gnome 3. I had heard ugly rumblings, but I said, "Come on, how bad could it be?" It turns out it was far worse that I could have imagined.

I liked Gnome 2. I still like it. I ran Gnome 2 for many years -- in fact I have run gnome as long as there was gnome to run!

Those days are gone. I have switched to xfce. Xfce is great!
Some people hint that something called LXDE may be an even better option.

Gnome 3 is a nightmare. I don't know what those boys are smoking. I have tried it on two different occasions and bailed out both times. For one thing it won't even run on some hardware. (Will it run over a VNC link? Maybe in some degraded mode, if you can even apply that term to Gnome 3).

Apparently there are (somewhere) people who like it -- maybe.

Lots of people are abandoning gnome and even Fedora because of it, and I am proud to be one of them. I was pleased, but not really surprised when I thought about it, to find that Linus Torvalds has also abandoned Gnome 3 for Xfce:

• Linus Torvalds ditches Gnome for XFCE

Here are a couple of quotes (from Linus):

I used to be upset when gnome developers decided it was "too complicated" for the user to remap some mouse buttons. In gnome3, the developers have apparently decided that it's "too complicated" to actually do real work on your desktop, and have decided to make it really annoying to do.

Here's an example of "the crazy": you want a new terminal window. So you go to "activities" and press the "terminal" thing that you've made part of your normal desktop thing (but why can't I just have it on the desktop, instead of in that insane "activities" mode?). What happens? Nothing. It brings your existing terminal to the forefront.

That's just crazy crap. Now I need to use Shift-Control-N in an old terminal to bring up a new one. Yeah, that's a real user experience improvement. Sure.

I'm sure there are other ways, but that's just an example of the kind of "head up the arse" behavior of gnome3. Seriously. I have been asking other developers about gnome3, they all think it's crazy.

I'm using Xfce. I think it's a step down from gnome2, but it's a huge step up from gnome3. Really.

Replying to Dave Jones of Red Hat, Torvalds also called for Fedora/Red Hat to fork GNOME.

While you are at it, could you also fork gnome, and support a gnome-2 environment?

I want my sane interfaces back. I have yet to meet anybody who likes the unholy mess that is gnome-3.

I found an ARS technica article on gnome of great interest.
Of perhaps even more interest is an essay entitled gnome in the age of decadence.

The gist of the second article is that as of June, 2008 activity related to gnome was basically maintenance, cautious change, and dealing with entropy. A normal, and I would say very desirable state of affairs in a mature software project. Not inspiring for a talented software developer no doubt, but the question has to be asked: who is this for? what is the point of this effort? If it is to provide entertainment for the gnome developers, then gnome 3 is I suppose a grand success.