[masida]

I've been using GNOME 3 on Debian Jessie for about a year now on my main work machine and I have to say that I'm very happy with it. I switched to it after having used a XMonad desktop for about a year, I think that says a lot.

What I like is the fact that everything just works (tm). Just as it used to be on Mac OS X. No need to fiddle with 10 volume control applets on your minimal tiling WM, none of them works well with PulseAudio. Same for the battery indicators, manually loading your desktop background, setxkbmap etcetera in your .xinitrc. You're basically forced to mix-and-match your whole desktop.

GNOME 3 comes with batteries included. Everything works out-of-the-box. Yes, the eye candy is a bit too much, but I think the Activities menu is very useful and productive. I can just use my computer, like I did on Mac OS X before. But now I the Linux desktop also gives me much better performance, package management and stability.

Only thing I miss on GNOME 3 is a XMonad's tiling system and keybindings. It's a shame they lost the ability to swap the window manager for your own.