What happens when Gnome-Shell isn't behaving?

["G. Michael Carter" <mikey carterfamily ca>]

Gnome Shell is one of these applications that is amazing, as long as everything is working.   But on a system that Gnome-Shell is slow, or glitchy the Gnome-Shell overview interface is complete garbage and totally frustrating.

I agree 200ms is fast enough and the overview page is a great concept, I would just like to see better fall back when it's too slow or doesn't come up at all (another random weird case which started happening when I have a virtual machine running)   -- I know, log a bug... but what do you do in the mean time? --

In the case the overview page is not working, If you want to see what's running you hit ALT-TAB.   If you know the application to run like "xterm" you can hit ALT-F2.   There's just no backup if you don't know the name of the application, and need a menu/application list or the application search.

Since it seems altering the UI to give that backup is out of the question, what about a hot-key for fallback mode?   or a hot key to restart the gnome shell, without killing the running apps?   I'm open to suggestions here.