[lug] gnome shell, unity and going back

[Davide Del Vento]

Hi,
after half a day spent trying to figure out why my shiny new debian
box was completely broken (menus disappearing, missing applications
and commands, a lot of weird behaviors - I thought I had by mistake
apt-get-remove'd something critical), I figure out (after a clean
reinstall) they've just pushed out the new gnome shell.

I'm sick, after half a day spent with it (even in fallback mode) I
want gnome 2 back. Does anybody have any experience in running any
distribution with gnome 2? And I mean, any distribution committed to
providing future support, not just an old distribution with a nearby
end of life (I couldn't find any, but maybe you've done more
homeworks).

Did anybody moved to KDE? With what success? What about switching
XFCE? I'm considering this my only option, at this point.

Or did anybody hated gnome3 a lot (even in fallback and trying to
restore the "super-needed" functionalities such as
"focus-follow-mouse", "minimize" and "maximize") and eventually
learned to like (or at least cope with) it?

And yes, I've seen the few articles on LWN about it, starting from
this one: http://lwn.net/Articles/433409/ (not sure I've seen them
all, so if you have a link to a good one, please post, even if it's
behind the paywall: I'm member).

Bottom line question: I know only myself can know what I need and like
and I should try it by myself. However, since this is a major switch
which I was hoping to avoid, I would love to learn what other people
did - I mean, people who loved gnome 2 and hated gnome 3 (and unity
FWIW) when they first saw it, if you are not in this category, feel
free to comment, but it's not your opinion I'm looking for :-)

Thanks a lot.
Davide