gnome 3

I read Prashanth's review of the new GNOME 3, which gave me a good idea of what GNOME 3 is all about, I think. I was almost tempted to take a look at it myself, by trying the Fedora-based live CD available for download at http://www.gnome3.org/tryit.html.

But, I figured it would be a waste of time. I'd probably only play around with the live CD once or twice. Also, there will probably be quite a few changes to GNOME Shell by the time I actually get around to installing a distro that comes with GNOME 3.

From what I've seen so far, nothing about GNOME 3 excites me. It bugs me that it seems to be aimed more at folks who use portable devices with touchscreens, and perhaps netbook users, than at PC users. Prashanth's comments about not being able to click on the desktop and not being able to configure the panels don't make GNOME 3 seem very appealing.

While KDE4 evolved into something that I really enjoy using, I'm not confident that the same thing will happen with GNOME 3. Perhaps I won't mind the "fallback mode" so much. We'll see how things go; most likely, I won't have to make a decision about it until Ubuntu Lucid and/or Debian Squeeze (I'm running GNOME in both) come to the end of their respective lives. At that point, if I find that I don't like GNOME 3, there's always KDE4 and Xfce; I can install and use one of those instead.