[rkalla]

Used gnome-shell on Fedora 15 for a few weeks, loved it but didn't love Fedora.

Moved to Ubuntu 11.04 before giving up on Linux and even though I'm not the biggest Unity look-and-feel fan, it has most of the aspects of gnome-shell I like and worked smoothly on my ThinkPad T60 except for hardware volume buttons which was fixed with [1] and slow wireless due to an older kernel which was fixed with [2].

Overall this idea (inspired by Spotlight and I think perfected in Windows Vista by mapping it to a single key) of mapping the Windows key to an auto-focused, system wide search box is fantastic. I really wouldn't want to go back to a system without that keystroke. Gnome using that same structure and taking you to this nice overview/launch panel is a really slick refinement.

[1] http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=60945#p3793... [2] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1837729