It just keeps getting worse and worse - it's so bad, it's almost funny now. Technical sites (slashdot, etc) are full of hate-filled diatribes about Gnome3/Unity. Linus himself has abandoned it for XFCE. Countless users I have setup with Ubuntu over the years as the "nice, easy, free" alternative to Windows have started to contact me as one by one they dist-upgrade from the old LTS version and suddenly find themselves face to face with the horror of Unity, and no way back. Linux Mint is hugely on the ascendance versus Ubuntu, no small part due to their retrofitting of Gnome3 plugins to make it slightly less hideous to use and complete eschewing of Unity. All over the world, smug KDE users are - quite rightly - laughing their asses off. My friends and parents hate Unity. I hate Unity. *Everyone* hates Unity!
To be fair, Gnome3 is slightly less insanity-inducing than Unity - it's relatively easy to add some plugins and turn off a
lot of it's stupidity but it is still just, well, terrible. In the last week I tried an experiment - I happen to have a 7" touchscreen gadget lying around that is linux compatible (an O2 joggler, for what it's worth) so I thought I'd stop hating for a minute and try the new interface where it's supposed to shine - away from my multiscreen, huge desktop workstation and on a small, touchscreen fondleslab. And I regret to report it's still unbearable, even in it's native environment.
Don't get me wrong - I love new, bleeding edge stuff and will try anything out - I'm usually a day zero adopter of anything new and funky. I'm also old and experienced enough to not be particularly set in my ways - I still use CDE on AIX/HPUX most days, fvwm/awesome on *BSD, etc: bells and whistles are optional and I don't really mind any GUI as long as I have somewhere to put all my open terminals and get some work done. But completely chucking out the desktop
metaphor of 20+ years of GUI based computing was always going to be a risky proposition and one I'm not sure that is currently working out very well.
We shall see, I guess. May you live in interesting times, and all that.
Mat
