[nycticorax]

Not to beat a dead horse, but I wanted to respond to a couple things:

6. I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. To be more precise, the thing that I like is the menu bar as a central organizing element of the application, with the familiar "File", "Edit", etc. menus. I agree that having even one level of submenus below these is suboptimal, and having two is terrible. I think it remains to be seen whether they're going away. On OS X, for one, they don't seem to be going anywhere, and that seems like a good decision to me.

7. I would prefer if Gnome, Canonical, etc. gave up on the idea that you're going to run the same desktop and applications on a desktop as on a phone. I think they should make a variant interface for touch devices, like Apple has done. Of course "Gnome Desktop" and "Gnome Touch" should share code to the extent possible, but I think the desktop and a phone are just too different to share a common UI.

Honestly, I think Gnome 3 is in many ways the most polished and beautiful of the Linux desktops, but they've made a few fundamental decisions that I just can't get behind.