The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Looks funny the fact that many of the comments to this article are from gnome developers suggesting to users to change platform if they do not like the new behavior, stick to gnome 2, move to kde, move to xfce, move to lxde or whatever.

Apart from this, I notice 4 facts:

1) Gnome 3 seems to have completely fragmented the gnome community users. Yesterday, gnome users made a critical mass, being all on gnome 2. Tomorrow they will not be a critical mass anymore, with a bit of them on gnome 2, a bit on gnome 3, a bit on unity, etc.

2) Taking away options, but encouraging extensions as a way to personalize behavior will additionally create fragmentation, making bug reporting and fixing a mess. Bug reports will look like: Menu so and so not working properly with gnome 3 plus <list 10 extensions to personalize behavior>.

3) Who makes a product, should probably first decide who is the market. The Linux market has traditionally been populated by more computer literate people than Windows. It is a niche, but a significant one. Now gnome seems to have moved to target those who are beyond the average windows user. I think that this will not buy a single new user (since these are anyway scared by the state of hardware support in linux) and loose many old ones.

4) If someone gives him/her an application that messes the gconf stuff (either incidentally or maliciously), a normal user will never be able to fix it by the gnome graphical interface and will likely remain with a broken desktop.