Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gnome 3 is not too well liked, but I think it looks absolutely great and has probably the best ergonomics out of any desktop I have used (including osx.. seriously, what’s up with their window management?!)
For me, it has the worst ergonomics of any desktop I've used. Since I asked somebody else to be specific, I feel that I should be specific. The horizontal panel across the top of the screen is an egregious waste of space, especially on modern widescreen displays where vertical pixels are valuable. A graphical task switcher was one of the most substantial UI improvements in Windows 95. GNOME banishers this to usually…
> The horizontal panel across the top of the screen is an egregious waste of space, especially on modern widescreen displays where vertical pixels are valuable.
OSX has a similar toolbar, windows has a much bigger one at the bottom. It is valuable space, but I think it is well-used, will come back to it later.
> A graphical task switcher was one of the most substantial UI improvements in Windows 95. GNOME banishers this to usually hidden, minor feature. That's bad design. GNOME is actively hostile to beginners and less proficient users.
It is available by a single flick of the mouse (Fitt’s law: the corner is basically infinite sized) for beginners/when you are constrained to mouse/(minor point but even on touchscreen). For power users there is the super key, and for laptop users the swipe up with 3 fingers in a smooth motion is easily the best way to get to the activities tab. Besides the “task switcher” at the bottom, I personally am much quicker to discern which application I want to switch to based on how I expect it to look, vs an icon. Windows didn’t add a popup of how it looks for no reason to their task switcher.
> keyboard
It is quite customizable (if nothing else, by plugins), but I think it is unfair to take it as a negative that gnome2 hotkeys no longer work. It is quite clearly not an incremental change from that, for that go with Mate.
> titlebar
I am undecided on whether it’s a good thing or not. Your previously mentioned vertical space problem is literally the reasoning behind that, so it is not made on a whim. Otherwise, I have never really rolled up a window for real use, besides playing with animations back in the compiz days. I don’t find it useful. Minimization is also an interesting question - there could definitely be improvements here (maybe the sketch area of i3 and alia be a better option?), but it is absolutely usable. I usually just make multiple desktops and group activity-relevant windows on a same one.
> I do not normally store files on my desktop, except the temporary holding place, but I do use it as a convenient place to store convenient shortcuts to my normal working folders. It's my computer, and therefore I get to choose where to store things. It is not the position of the desktop designers to decide that I cannot store things on the desktop.
Feel free to reenable that with a single extension.
> file manager
You can use any file manager, it should not be a criticism of the Gnome DE, just because it runs under the same project. The same is true for your criticism of GTK.