I'm guessing you say that because you expect him to be doing crazy magic developery things that normal people don't need, but the objections he raises seem to be about fairly "normal" uses (he uses the terminal as an example but presumably it's the same for any other app).
Haha, I was so confused. I thought Red Hat Linux was dropping Gnome3 in favor of XFCE as the default GUI shell. A few minutes later reading through the whole G+ thread it became apparent that Linus, as an individual, has decided to use XFCE.
I like the Shell. I really do. And that's from someone that
- used (black|open)box for a loooong time
- dislikes KDE's gazillion settings and the bling it offers
I cannot point you to the single one killer feature. It just hits the sweet spot between good looking (subjective, of course) and usable (ditto).
My previous workflow on any platform has been tied to something that combines searching/launching. OS X? Quicksilver. Windows? Launchy, with Windows 7 the startmenu became useable as an alternative. Linux? Gnome Do.
It just comes natural now to hit super and start typing. I do understand the point of other commenters here about breaking this as a modifier key, but frankly - I never used it as such. Except for super + space to launch Gnome Do/Launchy/you see where I'm getting to.. I don't use tools that use weird (emacs, sorry, we're just not meant to be together) key combinations and I don't use composition to access accents/umlauts/special characters. Although I'm german and my keyboard layout is the US one.
So: Sure, there are rough edges. It's new. But some parts of the discussion here seem to be a mixture of real issues and a healthy dose of 'omg it's different'.
Exactly. Gnome3 tries to reduce the time you spend searching for icons+windows and/or sorting them. That's the most time consuming task for a desktop user. It makes total sense to improve on that.
I'm also faster at finding an icon when I first need to show the activities bar, instead of looking for it in an always-visible taskbar.
How is that possible? Shouldn't the taskbar be faster to access?
It's selective perception: The longer you stare at something, the less interest it holds for the brain.
Example: You see 20 individual looking apples in front of you. Each has it's own shape/color. You sit in front of those apples for hours, you don't exactly recognise them during work. Focusing on them again and finding a specific one is going to take longer as if they were hidden from view and just pop into view each time you want one.
I would find the exact opposite faster. Looking at something I'm used to looking at is easy, and it'll help muscle memory to be persistent. I don't have to decide I want to change, then wait while my hand triggers the popup, then parse the shapes.
That's not to say that the popup isn't a good idea, but the only benefit I see is I screen space.
I guess I am not the target audience either, but gnome2 remains my favorite desktop environment and once that is dropped from distros I will go another route, perhaps xfce but it does indeed have many shortcomings.
Enough said, let's move on.