It has been discussed controversially before its release and it certainly will be for the next few weeks. To be honest I wouldn’t expect anything else if a very important desktop environment decides to make the radical changes Gnome made for their 3.0 release.
Nevertheless, after a few days of using and liking the Gnome Shell and Gnome 3 there’s still a quite a lot I dislike:
Gnome Shell eats my Windows-key. Yeah, using Super_L is a good idea and finally gives that modifier some meaning. I actually used Super for a lot of stuff like
- Super+V: display Parcellite’s menu (Ctrl+C history). Quite obvious to use something close to Ctrl+V, right?
- Super+Arrows: switch workspaces, because I never liked Ctrl+Alt+…
- Super+Z (or Y on German keyboards): display Guake terminal
As I said: Gnome eats Super_L which means that every shortcut using that key doesn’t work any more. Bad bug, really bad bug. Well, I admit that’s a small problem, a bug report, and not really influencing productivity here – I just disabled Super_L for now.
The much more annoying “innovation” is the complete lack of applets. I never cluttered panels with lots of stuff – I use only one panel at the top – but there are three applets I can’t live without:
CPU monitor, weather and, most important, my time tracking Hamster.
I frequently caught myself looking at the temperature to only read my username – seriously, who needs to read his own name in the top panel? Alzheimers? – or the Activities button where the hamster applet and CPU monitor used to be.
They are gone (forever?) and I’ll miss them very much. I’m a sad panda.