I'm glad they are deviating from core GNOME as they seem to have more focused art direction and better usability in general, for me Ubuntu is a much smoother and more pleasant Linux experience than any other distro for this reason.

Good for them, as long as they don't FUD on GNOME.

Better usability ? I don't think so, I remember being orce fed the first version of message indactor with Gwibber, Pidgin and Evolution were 3 entries of the same menu behaving totally differently and unconsistently.

Unity feels quite raw and bulky. I don't think my dad will search it's application by their exact names. INMHO, the Gnome-Shell menu is much better in that it let you see you apps a people familiar with any recent smartphone won't by lost. I can't say the same for Unity main menu.

Quite frankly, who cares? I'm tired of the GNOME release plans: remove features, make GTK+ controls bulkier than ever. It's like they're trying to ensure that the same amount of stuff fits on a screen despite increased screen resolution.

I'm happy to see the role Compiz is taking on. A recent rewrite that cleaned things up, replacing more and more window management tasks, support for non-accelerated backends. I'd love to see Compiz's wallpaper plugin mature and replace nautilus for the task. (It'd also allow for the global menu to not be awkward when the wallpaper has focus and for multiple wallpapers on different workspaces). Though frankly I'd love to see nautilus die in a fire anyway.

I don't care about them drifting away. I might even understand some point they made about GNOME. What I don't appreciate it's some people in Ubuntu world (that would be community and canonical) blaming GNOME Upstream for the drift. They want to lead their own platform somewhere else, fine, just do it. Don't pretend that you've been pushed to.

The Gnome Zeitgeist project originated from the Ubuntu community and at first they weren't accepted for inclusion in the project and started to whine in a very ubuntuesque way. They weren't listening at all to the maintainer's rationale for rejection. Happily at some point they started to listen and will probably be a key piece of GNOME 3.2

Now, I can't say the same for some others projects from canonical. challenging upstream is one thing, not being open to dialogue another, pushing its agenda by FUDing another beast altogether.

As for removing features ... what are talking about ? GNOME 3.0 ? It's not like it is a finished and dead product that won't evolve anymore ! Bulkier controls ?! Come man, just change your theme. Increased screen resolution ? Like Unity wasn't made for netbooks and tablet. I'll stop feeding the troll right here ;-)

What? Gnome 2.3 has been shedding features for sometime. Ability to change GDM theme? Gone. Ability to configure gnome screensavers? Gone. That's not even mentioning 3.0, but I understand that it's like KDE, in that 3.1 will be much better suited for full time use.

You miss the point on the controls. Unity WAS made for netbooks and tablets. It conserves UI space in a more concise manner (not to mention that I enjoy the search/icon paradigm. It's what Windows 7 did with dock/search-start-menu. OS X has the Dock and spotlight. The jury is in, it's popular)

Most of the themes I've seen for GNOME3 still look bulky. Maybe I haven't seen enough themes yet.

You're right about gdm, still I didn't noticed it until you told me. I think most people just change the wallpaper and at most apply a different control theme.

Well I don't really get you point on the controls and screen estate then. To me "bulkier" controls precisely ease their use on netbooks and tablets.

Well the search is a great feature if it is fuzzy and intelligent enough to match on related keyword. Now, for now, it doesn't quite work that way. Regular people don't dare searching because they might not even know what to search. So to me gnome-shell as a better compromise it does not force search on you. With Unity, if you don't want to search, you need extra clicks to get to the actual application list.

There are currently 9 Gtk+3 themes on gnome-look.org that's hardly enough to leverage the possibilities of the theming engine. Better theme will come and will harness the power of the new the engine.