Gnome 3

In Linux, there are many different desktop environments you can use. Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and LXDE - to name a few. Actually, those are the only ones I've used. I'm personally a Gnome fan, but I use LXDE on Lubuntu on the older computers in my house. The only major distribution that I know of (other than OpenSuSE) that distributes Gnome 3 is Fedora 15, which I have installed on my laptop (dual booting with Windows).

Gnome 3 is very different from other desktop environments. The application starter is completely different from what I'm used to...

Meanwhile, the application switching interface is substantially different, because of the lack of taskbar. A major issue that I found is that Alt-Tab doesn't work the way it's supposed to. When you press Alt-Tab in Gnome 3, you switch between applications, not windows. In order to switch between windows, you have to press Alt-`. However, this command only switches between windows in the active application.

The other thing I don't like about Gnome 3 is how there's a close button, but nothing else - and also how the title bars are a bit oversized. My screen isn't particularly high resolution (it's only 1366x768), and it's not really pleasing to see title bars that are unreasonably big.

I would probably say, though, that Gnome 3 is 90% usable if I used a netbook (with the exception of the Alt-Tab issue), because I always felt the "new desktops" (Unity on Ubuntu 11.04, Gnome 3 on Fedora 15) were more suited for smaller screens - especially in Unity because the windows automatically maximize.