Oh hey, GNOME 3 finally working.
Initial thoughts:
It's pretty, it's clean, and it's got enough in common with Unity that I think it's a little silly that there was enough of a schism for an Ubuntu/GNOME divorce.
Graphics acceleration is, so far, working flawlessly for me. I haven't used Mutter long enough to form a strong opinion on it, but my initial reaction is that I like it a fuck of a lot better than Compiz.
It's funny, given the attention to reducing the amount of wasted space onscreen (things like launchers, the taskbar, the Applications menu, and the workspace switcher are all on a separate interface that toggles when you hit the Start/Super button), that there's still a big dumb useless goddamn bar at the top of the screen, emptier than ever.
You know what? I could describe the huge amount of shit at the top of my screen, but a picture is worth the proverbial thousand words.
What the fuck is that shit? Why in God's name do I need 6 rows for that?
I assume GNOME's probably going to follow Unity's (well, Apple's) lead and combine the two titlebars(!) and menubar into a single bar, but for now it just looks sloppy, especially given the emphasis they've put on not cluttering the rest of the screen. Somebody want to explain what the point is of saving space by removing Minimize and Maximize buttons if you're just going to replace them with Giant Fucking Empty Gray Second Titlebar?
(EDIT 2: Oh, and the Applications Menu is a goddamn mess that just shows all your applications in one window, unsorted, with the potential to narrow them down by search but no way to categorize them. I assume that will also change and you'll be able to browse by category like in Unity.
EDIT 3: And for some damn reason most applications show up twice, once with a nice crisp hi-res icon and once with a shitty blurry low-res one. Oh, and also you still can't set Ctrl-Tab as a shortcut keystroke in GNOME Terminal or Nautilus.)
Also, if you squint to read the tabs in that screenshot, you may notice that alt-tab does not seem to be enabled out of the box.
Fortunately,
that second tab offers a solution: hacking fucking gconf, hooray!
(EDIT: That page is either bullshit or outdated; you can enable Alt-Tab in the regular control panel. So, disregard. In fact, it even lets you tab across desktops, my preferred method.)
(EDIT 4: But it's awkward for alt-tabbing between different windows in the same app.)
(EDIT 5: And the window for assigning keyboard shortcuts is so tiny that most lines are cropped, eg "Move between windows of a...", "Move between panels and th...", "Move between windows imm...". There are no scrollbars and it cannot be resized.)
So yeah, it IS another example of the GNOME devs ramming some UI theory they read in a paper somewhere down all their users' throats against protests. Which fortunately means it'll probably be fixed a little later down the line.
But as far as UI paradigm shifts, this actually is a pretty neat one and, most surprisingly, I'm finding it stable and zippy as hell. Some shit may still be missing, but it's a lot more complete than Unity is, and a lot more complete than KDE 4.0 was.
There's a lot to like here about both the frontend and the backend. I'm going to be playing with this one for awhile I think.
