Does Gnome 3 Suck?
I've been using Gnome 3 for many years, and I think it was a big improvement over Gnome 2. I was confused by how much hate it seemed to attract, and I put it down to a vocal minority shooting over the content majority.
This week, that changed. I was writing a Java application, and I had a really annoying bug. When I closed one of its windows, things often went weird. The alt+F4 shortcut stopped working, so I mapped my own shortcut ctrl+F4, and this worked... sometimes. Other times, the window failed to respond to any keys. The keyboard focus was just inexplicably broken. After many wasted hours, I installed Cinnamon, logged out, and then logged in to Cinnamon. Hey presto, no keyboard focus problems.
After playing with Cinnamon for less than an hour, I began to realise why people hate Gnome 3 so much. It was such a welcome change to go back to a sane desktop environment.
I have found a few problem with Cinnamon too, but only minor bugs. Gnome3 has major bugs, but worse still, it has many problems that are deliberate design decisions, so will never be fixed. (Unless the developers realise their experiment has failed, and revert back to sensible design choices).
Does Gnome 3 Suck? Yep. Try Cinnamon, I think you'll be pleased.
Update
I've now switched from Cinnamon to KDE. I can't remember what made me choose to switch again, but I'm very happy with KDE.
I do have one gripe : The middle button doesn't work when panning. I have to press and hold the left and right mouse buttons. This isn't a bug in KDE, or the applications though (as it manifests in Gnome and KDE with all applications). My T400 laptop has two sets of mouse buttons, and weirdly only one set works when panning. I always assumed the two sets of buttons were wired in parallel, but apparently not. Hmm.
2024 Update
I'm still using KDE, and have never even considered changing. I can't think of a single thing that should be added (or removed).
There are features that I don't use, but they don't get in my way.
Ah, I've just thought of something. It would be nice if there were JVM wrappers to KDE's APIs.
I doubt I'd ever consider writing a desktop extension in C or C plusplus, but if I could do it in Kotlin, then I would probably give it go. That's not a fault of KDE though. That's a result of the splintering that occurs based on computer languages.
One of the things I really hated about Gnome3 was the time I spent writing desktop extensions in Javascript. The language sucks, but it was good that it was possible.
The problem was the churn in the Gnome 3 API. My extensions broke on every update. A huge waste of my time. If your API isn't stable, don't encourage the masses to use it! If they had stated up front that the API was unstable, I would have waited till they are stable. (I'm assuming they are more stable now?)
Being an interpreted language makes the problem all the worse. You can't check for API changes at compile-time, you have to run every line of code. That's not easy, or quick to do!
As an aside, I stopped using Python when version 3 came out for similar reasons. I stuck with 2.7 for a while, but eventually, packages that I depended on stopped being maintained, and my code was as good as useless.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I'm not wasting my time on Python again, they don't care about backwards compatibility. They don't care about my time.
By comparison, I suspect all my ancient Java code will still compile and run just fine.