[yason]

Gnome 3 shattered the experience and momentum.

While Gnome 2 was gradually approaching ultimate goodness with its essential configurability (not too many knobs but an explicit set of gconf properties that you could tune if you wanted to), consistency, ease of use, and ten years of GTK2 providing a platform for applications that look and behave uniformly, it was certainly lacking in the integration side (networking, messaging, etc.) for which Gnome 3 is a response.

However, Gnome 3 broke so many little things that it doesn't matter what the new features do. This is one of the cases where Microsoft has been right: when you're big enough, don't muck with backwards-compatibility.

[slurgfest]

Gnome 2 was continuing to slavishly emulate Windows 98, right down to the opaque registry. But I guess that's what more users wanted, so Linux is doomed to stay the same forever as everything else innovates and overtakes it.

[ixacto]

I want my desktop to look like, but not be Windows 98. I don't like the MS registry, or anything else MS for that matter, Debian With a desktop environment that enforces the desktop metaphor is a sensible alternative...

It would not be that easy to write a long email, let alone an article on a tablet or tablet-like computer interface.