Using Gnome all day, nope not dead. Gnome Shell is quite a good environment. I think many people just complain because it's a change. People don't like change.
Totally agree with you, people who don't like what happening can just leave and start using MATE or XFCE instead. GNOME's directions isen't even targeted at the previous userbase anyway. I'm too young to have got into GNOME2 as much as it seems some people have done, but seriously it's just silly to complain and whine. I know some also includes very contructive critism in their complains but most people don't, and that is those I dislike.
As a long time user of Gnome 2.x, I welcome most of the changes made in Gnome Shell, haven't had any worthwhile complaints since the 3.4 release. It's cleaner, faster, has better window management features, and just gets out of the way better than Gnome 2.x ever did.
Totally agree with you. I didn't like the gnome-shell when it first came out (slow, buggy as ...), but I like it now: it's very clean, does what I need with little effort, and stays out of the way otherwise.
I wish there were more themes around though ... it seemed like themes were plentiful and easily usable in Gnome 2 but they seem kinda thin on the ground with Gnome 3.
[I gather the WM in Gnome 3 is compatible with Gnome 2 themes, but GTK 3 cannot use GTK 2 themes ... or something. I dunno. The multitude of theme formats is confusing.]
The real key is find Gtk themes that are compatible with both the Gtk2 and Gtk3 engines. Combine that with a good Gnome-Shell theme and a good font, and things actually look really nice.
I actually just found a couple new themes that are really great:
GNOME's directions isen't even targeted at the previous userbase anyway
Yes, this is a criticism that has been levelled at them by devs who have left the project: they abandoned their former audience without having a clear idea of who their new audience is.
lol i'm no gnome dev but i read all that crap on HN since gnome-shell was released (and before unity), so yeah, i can read.
If people are too stubborn to try something new, they can still install fvwm95 and live in desktop-yesterday-land for the rest of their lives, no problem.