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It's basically a case of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it": Most users were perfectly productive with Gnome 2 and would have been happy if they just fixed the remaining bugs. It's also the reason a lot of people are switching to Xfce : it's very similar to Gnome 2, it just works and doesn't get in your way.
Now, the thing with Gnome 3 is that they are trying to do much more than just a window/desktop manager. They are trying to build a whole ecosystem of apps with some new UI paradigms. The new UI is mostly targeted at tablet-style use cases, where you have one app fullscreen. The problem is, a lot of Gnome 2 users are engineers/scientists/technical users with multiple screens and a lot of windows.
That's interesting, but do those people see themselves using Gnome 2 in another 10 years? What about progress?
From what I've read about the subject, I've got the feeling that the devs wanted to appeal to a broader audience. Unfortunately, it seems that all they've managed to do was just to drive away the audience they had.
I think Cinnamon should have been a Gnome 3 project (the fallback option).
Edited 2012-11-29 16:04 UTC
I used GNOME 3 (on Fedora Linux) for the first time last weekend. I can give you two very specific reasons why I didn't like it:
It took more mouse clicks and more mouse movement to use my computer. It was very tiring, but I suppose I may have been using GNOME 3 "incorrectly".
It came with an "Accessability" icon in the tray area. I have no need for accessability options (I'm not seeing-impared, and so on) so I wanted to remove the icon. To remove it, I had to do an Internet search and then edit an obscure un-documented file.





Member since:
2006-05-18
As someone who uses Linux once in a blue moon, just to see what's changed I'm genuinly curious what's so fundamentally wrong with Gnome 3 that it gets so much hate?
Judging from the screenshots and online videos it looks and feels much more modern than Gnome 2 or XFCE. So why are people so pissed?