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.