[wladimir]

This is the final straw, I'm switching to KDE/Kubuntu in next release.

Even if a transparent terminal is a weird thing to like, I like it, and have always used it. Taking it away just because you think it's useless is not acceptable to me. Really you can come with 1000's of arguments why it's non-productive, "just aesthetic", "not in web browsers either" and so on but I don't care. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

(as an aside I think it could be a interesting feature in web browsers to support window-level transparency. Use a background with partial transparency and render web content directly to the background. For example, for desktop widgets)

We're in 2013 right with super-powerful GPUs of today (and even the crappy i945 in your old laptop) it shouldn't be too much to ask to do a small bit of composition. Sure, X's archaic architecture may be at fault, it may be tricky, but now there's Wayland, Android Surfaceflinger, ... Please don't go backward to better support archaic APIs.

For me, open source is about choice and customization and possibilities, if I wanted a platform with a single vision I'd go for Apple.

[vidarh]

Frankly, I think Ubuntu will soon enough have so little of Gnome left in its standard version that you shouldn't worry too much about switching.