[mitjak]

It's interesting how I am in the same exact boat as you and everyone up the thread to the original commenter as far being basically fed up with Apple's shit. I am also quite glad indeed that there are now alternatives for those of us who do care about the UX, and my favourite of them is Gnome 3.

It's received a lot of bad press, but I feel like the majority of it is by the more hardcore Linux users who are understandably not used to the carpet being yanked from underneath them. I am still amazed, after an entire summer of using it, about just how much Gnome 3 has re-thought in terms of its UI. The experience is not without bumps and is definitely buggy in places, but I feel like it's the first open-source shell which places user experience at the top of its priority list.

EDIT: there are rumours Ubuntu 12.10 will come in a vanilla Gnome 3 flavour, as opposed to Unity. A "pure" Gnome 3 Debian is all I personally ever need to stay happy, particularly on my Apple hardware that (for now?) supports loading non-OSX operating systems.