[scribblemacher]

I've never understood who exactly is the target audience of Gnome 3 (and, to a lesser extent, Unity). It seems like these things would be great on an iPad or something like that, but what Linux users are really running Fedora or Debian on a touch device?

Not only that, I think many of these designs don't make sense to novice users either. I recently let me wife try a few live discs to see which one she liked best (she is very non-technical but was sick of Windows running like maple syrup). She ended up liking Mint's LXDE remix the most because it was simple and very fast. Unity's unifed menus and Gnome's app-not-windows design just confused her. Granted, she's just one person, but if it's not for me (the nerd) and it's not for her (the non-techie), who is supposed to be using Gnome 3?

What confuses me is that Gnome is community driven, and somehow a consensus of intelligent developers decided that this is the direction they want to take the project, despite Gnome's poor track record on mobile platforms and that the design paradigms don't accurately reflect the hardware on which the software is run. You'd think someone might have raised a hand and said "um, this design makes more sense on cell phones, which people are not running our product on."

[bratsche]

> It seems like these things would be great on an iPad or something like that, but what Linux users are really running Fedora or Debian on a touch device?

What you just described, sir, is a classic chicken/egg problem. Why would they design Gnome or Unity for multitouch users when there are none? But why would anyone use Gnome or Ubuntu on a multitouch device when the previous UIs were so mis-suited for that environment?

[pan69]

This is exactly the reason they shouldn't even be trying to get into that market. Competing with Apple, Microsoft and Google, why?

There will always be workstations. It would have been a great opportunity for Gnome to make the best damn workstation UI that ever existed (and they where on the right track with Gnome 2) but instead they jump on the touch screen band wagon in the hope of being adopted by device manufactures while in the process of doing so they're alienating their existing user base.

In the end, everyone loses.

[johnny22]

I doubt i'm the target audience, but strangely the only decision that's really stuck in my craw since gnome 2 is the lack of a delete option in the file chooser :)

[excuse-me]

It's nice on netbooks - the side bar and reduced top/bottom bars and menus is great on 1024x600 screens