GNOME 3.6 feedback

[Steven Osborne <sakmerlin37 lavabit com>]

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Dear GNOME Developers,

First, thank you for all the hard work your team has done over the
years; I have used GNOME since it was first publicly available, around
1998/99 if I remember correctly, and have loved it.  I am using GNOME as
it is installed in openSUSE 12.3 at the moment.

With that being said, I do have a few issues with the current direction
of GNOME:

1. The ACTIVITIES panel is changed, again; just when I was getting used
to the 3.4-ish style ACTIVITIES, with all icons readily available to its
right, I open up GNOME to find it missing; it took me a few minutes to
get where it was located, and that was a frustrating few minutes.

2. Nautilus is missing the menu bar; this took me quite a bit longer to
figure out, but I was finally able to find in the Ubuntu forums that you
have to right-click on the GNOME title bar on the FILES icon to get
preferences; I went through:

  2.1 - gconf-editor
  2.2 - dconf-editor
  2.3 - gnome-tweak-tools

and it was frustratingly unintuitive to right click on the title bar
when every other program I use does NOT require that.

3. The blocky-looking notification bar area looks horrible; I'm afraid
to look for the configuration for that area, as finding any
configuration tools has been unintuitive and difficult.

4. It is difficult to navigate with a mouse; granted the "GNOME" key
(i.e., called the Windows key for Microsoft) and typing is wonderful;
but, when I have to use a mouse, it is unwieldy and difficult; I do not
have a touch screen tablet or desktop system and, unless something major
changes in my life, I will not have one for the next 10 years or so; I
don't need or want my desktop to mirror the simplistic touch screens
found in iPhones, tablets, etc.

5. I just realized that I MUST slide the lock screen to unlock it using
a password; this is beyond ridiculous; I have a laptop/desktop and not a
touch screen, please let me just type my password in to unlock my
workstation.

6. The notifications pop-up in the bottom-middle of my screen and just
stay there until I have to stop what I am doing to click on it to go
away; I do not want notifications, about anything, really; please
provide a way to stop all notifications; heck, I can still access
regedit in Windows 8 to turn off their balloons.

I am disabled, having had an aneurysm rupture last year and being
frustrated aggravates my condition; unfortunately, GNOME 3.6 has done
nothing but provide me pain, literally; I get massive headaches when I
get frustrated to a certain level and my desktop experience with GNOME
has been the most frustrating computer experience in my 25+ years of
using computers.  It has been stated that the developers are no longer
listening to their users; I can only hope this is not the case, because
I will find a solution that works and whose developers are better
connected to their user base.

Overall, GNOME seems to be heading down the path to dumb down the user
experience.  I have tried to like the GNOME 3.x system, but cannot get
past the unintuitive changes.  Sadly, everyone I know that uses Linux,
and I used to run the Linux Users Group, has dropped GNOME, but me, and
3.6 is causing me to doubt continued use of the desktop environment.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Steve
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