Gnome is a perfect example of what designing with too much sense for aesthetics and no usage experience looks like.
It's nice looking, yes. On the surface things seem to be good enough. But start using the software, and discover how little though most of the features have been given.
Window cycling is one thing, but the issues go _way_ deeper than that. Small examples come from the file open/save dialog being into "Recent" mode by default, despite being totally useless since the dialog has no notion of what has been done outside of other applications (and come on, on Linux having a terminal open to script is pretty much the norm). There's an option to switch the dialog to directory mode (in "current cwd") [1], but of course there's no such fine-tuning in gtk3. I'm supporting users using Ubuntu in our facility, and they all hate this "recent" mode.
The list of gothas like this would be so awfully long that I stopped caring about Gnome first, and then Gtk3 entirely, since they are pretty much on the same development line of thought.
Luckily, thanks to XDG and several other common practices, a full DE like Gnome or KDE is pretty much useless on Linux. There are some many alternatives to choose from, that any complaint is largely irrelevant.
My suggestions to people liking Gnome though is this: dont' focus on looks, please try the alternatives. If you miss some "integration", ask for a standard or some consensus, not for any DE-specific feature.
recent mode is absolutely awful. Especially in save.
Also the lack of Delete/Rename means you can fuck something up (new directory) but can't fix it with out opening up a file browser, a problem that been known since 2.x days but no one has gotten around to fixing because apparently you have to go add support for it into gvfs then add the feature into the file picker.
It's nice looking, yes. On the surface things seem to be good enough. But start using the software, and discover how little though most of the features have been given.
Window cycling is one thing, but the issues go _way_ deeper than that. Small examples come from the file open/save dialog being into "Recent" mode by default, despite being totally useless since the dialog has no notion of what has been done outside of other applications (and come on, on Linux having a terminal open to script is pretty much the norm). There's an option to switch the dialog to directory mode (in "current cwd") [1], but of course there's no such fine-tuning in gtk3. I'm supporting users using Ubuntu in our facility, and they all hate this "recent" mode.
[1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/63202/can-i-stop-apps-from-se...
The list of gothas like this would be so awfully long that I stopped caring about Gnome first, and then Gtk3 entirely, since they are pretty much on the same development line of thought.
Luckily, thanks to XDG and several other common practices, a full DE like Gnome or KDE is pretty much useless on Linux. There are some many alternatives to choose from, that any complaint is largely irrelevant.
My suggestions to people liking Gnome though is this: dont' focus on looks, please try the alternatives. If you miss some "integration", ask for a standard or some consensus, not for any DE-specific feature.