So I installed the latest bits of Gnome-shell on my desktop -- yeah, I tend to just plunge right in w/nary a thought to my system's stability, don't I??
Anyway, here are my immediate thoughts, after about an hour of playing with/using it:
Look and Feel
The overall feel is pretty slick: my CPU is handling transitions pretty well, though I think my graphics card fan has been running non-stop. That's kinda to be expected, except that Enlightenment has been doing these transitions w/out acceleration for years...that's a bit strange. Why the desktop people don't get together and compare notes, I can't for the life of me figure out. If Gnome-Shell could do what it does and not need a souped-up graphics card, Linux would have an even better appeal.
That said, the effects are nice. Compiz is gone, so no wobbly windows, but what's there is decent. When you push your mouse to the upper-left, you get the Activities view; same as clicking the Activities icon. The zoom is really nice. Swapping between desktops is bloody fast from the Activities view, and the zooms are very smooth. The effects when you drag windows to/from different desktops are also quite nice. They self-arrange in the desktop, so moving applications around is kinda fun. After a while, you'll probably stop noticing though. Adding/removing desktops is also quite nice: they slide up or down. It seems like they are more focused on utility: effects are there to aid you in understanding what's happening, not necessarily for entertainment. Being the somewhat racoonish person that I am, however, I like shiny things. They could definitely use more effects and animations, but this is still good.
Application Switching
The application switcher is pretty darn cool. It's a bit like Gnome's switcher, but with 2 new features (that I can see):
1. Apps running on the current desktop are visually separated from the other apps running. There's a divider between them, so you know where apps are (generally speaking -- you know they are either "here" or "_somewhere_ else").
2. Those apps with multiple instances have a down-arrow, which you can either hover over w/the mouse, or navigate to using Ctrl+~. It will then drop down and allow you (using the mouse or Ctrl+~) to select one of the instances. Instances are displayed in a nice sub-switcher, so point #1 (separator) is also displayed. The key-combo is awkward though:
Hit Ctrl+Tab, holding Ctrl, press Tab until you highlight the application you want
Holding Ctrl, press ~ to drop into the instance-switcher; holding Ctrl, press ~ to swap between instances
Holding Ctrl, press Tab to get back to the main switcher
It's not terrible -- I could get used to it, but it will take a little while, and it could be better. Also, you cannot use Ctrl+~ on an application to switch instances...that would be a nice feature too.
Panels and Menu Bars
This area is the one I dread the most: I don't care for Apple's "whatever you are currently working on is the most important thing in the whole wide world and we would never want to distract you from anything else because we know how small your brain is that it can't handle more than one thing and by the way we'll also tell you what software to purchase and what's safe to have on your computer because Apple knows best and we love you and will always take care of you as long as you pay us and sign away your life and freedoms for the good of our company and our great leader"...ok, I'm getting off track.
Anyway, it _looks_ like the main menu is completely gone. That's right, gone. In the uper panel, on the left-hand side, there are two text areas: "Activities" (immutable, I think), and "Whatever you are working on right now". There is a date in the middle (w/calendar dropdown), and the user-login on the right (social-networking integrated, of course, but also w/other options, some of which I haven't played w/yet). The text describing the active window doesn't have a menu; as such, it is not at all what Apple does in OSX. In fact, it doesn't do ANYTHING. This is, of course, not very useful, because frankly, you already KNOW what you're looking at. I'm not sure if they're leaving this open for applications to supply their own menus, but even GEdit didn't do anything with it. I'll need to do some investigation to see what they're thinking.
You can't right-click on the upper panel, so the previous set of widget-style controls (e.g. system-monitor, network-monitor, app-launchers) is not available. I'm not sure if that will be dealt with in the future, or if they'll allow you to add a secondary panel w/them. I hope so -- I really like the quick-access icons.
The lower bar is gone -- no idea where it went. Which also means the task manager (e.g. your list of open windows) is also gone. So...when you're on a virtual desktop, you don't have an immediate way of knowing what's currently running in the space. The application switcher gives you a clue, but really, you need to go to the Activities view to see. This is probably the biggest shortcoming: I want to know what I have running at a glance, not with a few keystrokes or sliding my mouse up to a certain view which lays everything out.
Activities View
Ok, this is pretty cool. Slide the mouse up and to the left, and you'll have a new set of menus and options, along with a "Spaces"-style view of the desktops. You can easily add/remove desktops and move applications from one to the other. Every app has a nice 'x' next to it so you can kill them from this view; if the killed app needs to save state, it will zoom you into the desktop so you can confirm the prompt. Not bad -- a nice set of usability tweaks around a virtual desktop manager.
There are several options in the Activities view:
* Find: doesn't really work -- most of what I search for can't be found and I get a ton of errors on the command-line (since I started Gnome-shell from it)
* Applications: has the applications which can be found in the Applications menu in Gnome 2. Large icons, decent looking -- since Find is broken not very useful if you don't want to scroll alphabetically just to open Zim (which I DO use, BTW) Oh yeah, underneath is a bunch of app icons (either recently or currently used, I think) -- useful for commonly accessed apps, but...meh.
* Places: standard folders for Gnome...nothing to see here. Click on one and it will open (with a nice zoom in effect) in the first desktop and put you in that desktop
* Recent Documents: heck, I don't care about this feature, period.
* Tons of empty space from here on out -- this would be the perfect spot for a slideshow, or scrolling text, or a Doom minigame...heck, SOMETHING
Note: AFAIK, there is no way to get the system administration/preferences/tools from the Activities view. You can get to them by clicking on the menu in the rightmost corner on the panel, and selecting "System Preferences". This gives you a nice Control Center, which has the system administration tools grouped together in categories. I like this view, though I would prefer to get to it from the Activities view. My guess is they're really striving for a logical split: daily work vs. administrative tasks (which are less regular). I'm not convinced of the split, but I can overlook it and adapt. I like Control Center style dialogs: they help me logically group things together, whilst still seeing the other tools in their appropriate context, so this is a nice change.
Performance and System Load
Well, my CPU and RAM haven't dipped one bit. I'm running Flash, Firefox, Eclipse, and Thunderbird, and I'm having no lag from Gnome-Shell itself. This is pretty impressive; this is a standard load for Friday nights and it TANKED KDE 4.4. 4.5 might have some performance boosts, so I'll install that when I get a chance, but...I'm pretty impressed. Even with compositing (which I think is taxing my card a bit), my CPU hasn't spiked in heat or load, so I'm pretty content with the overall impact. Out of 2G, I have ~1G available for other apps, and plenty of CPU to spare.
Other Thoughts
It was easy to install and launch...whoopie...
Oh yeah, Launchy barely works. I can open it, but I can't see what I'm typing. It will still launch the applications, but...if I make a typo, I don't know what it will do since I can't see what it thinks I'm trying to type.
General Impression
Seeing as how it's 1AM, I'll wrap this up. Overall, not bad. Nothing terribly great, but not bad. The system performance is impressive, and the effects are minimal and nice. They certainly don't get in the way (unlike compiz which, at times, can make window management hard), but they also don't offer fun eye-candy for no reason whatsoever. I like the utility of the effects because they do, somewhat, visually aid in understanding what's happening. When the Find-functionality is fixed, it will be a nice feature, esp. if they allow you to type in a custom command from your path (something Gnome-do and KDE's app launcher allows). They need to decide on what the main panel is for. If they've already decided, they need to think again because it makes NO sense to simply tell me what I'm looking at when I already know what I'm looking at simply because I'm looking at it...heck, for this to be useful, I would have to stop looking at what I'm looking at to look at the panel to tell me what I'm looking at...auuughhh!!! it's maaaadnessssss!!!!!
And I'd like a way to tell what's running on the current desktop at a glance...I can get accustomed to using Ctrl+Tab, but I don't see that going over very well.
Out of 10, I'd give it a 7.5. I can use it, but I don't want to...yet.
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