Furthermore, I have better things to do with my time than spend time mucking around with configuration files and theme settings. Back in high school I had the time and inclination, and in fact I did so; now that I run a business, I'd rather spend that time doing actual development. Not to mention the moms and grandmas of the world who don't even know what a theme is. I, and they, need a UI that just works out of the box.

And finally, just about every computer that is responsible for my internet access runs on top of software written by large corporations who have hired people to develop for open source bodies. Let's not forget that it's for-profit companies with full-time programmers like Red Hat, Canonical, IBM, Intel, etc. that are more than partly responsible for the relatively wide enterprise (and desktop!) adoption of Linux today.

I'm not out to bash Gnome, Linux, or open source; I use Ubuntu on my work laptop every day. I criticize out of the desire to see the open source movement develop something better, and that means not patting everyone on the back just for "working hard." It's precisely that kind of "gold star for effort" attitude that lets crappy software exist.

I am sure this will be a learning experience. It's alpha software, after all, and it is released in order to allow people to learn what works and what doesn't in the real world. As usual, with open-source, if you decide to use Gnome Shell right now, or in April, you'll be running the bleeding edge. I would say that, if you want to run it as stable software, you should wait until October. Open-source is developed in the open, as it invites intelligent criticism and grows stronger with it.

> Furthermore, I have better things to do with my time than spend time mucking around with configuration files and theme settings

Unless you want to design themes, you are not supposed to do that. I rarely do. I think I haven't done that since 2003 or so, and I was really going for a full customized desktop at the time. I did it because I wanted to do it.

> And finally, just about every computer that is responsible for my internet access runs on top of software written by large corporations who have hired people to develop for open source bodies.

I would like to point out a lot of Gnome has also been developed by a lot of full-time employees of for-profit companies too. It was you who called them "spare-time developers". I am not sure how it will play out with Novell's demise, but I trust other companies, like Red Hat and Canonical can chip in if needed.

> I'm not out to bash Gnome, Linux, or open source

I then certainly misread your post. I didn't realize you meant "spare-time developers" as a compliment. My bad. I am sure open-source has a lot to gain from the criticism of a bunch of spare-time experts.

Meant as a compliment, of course.

"The vast majority (70 percent) of contributors work on the project on their spare time, while an additional 20 percent of contributors do so on both a paid and voluntary basis."

Adding the percentages of the top 5 corporate contributors adds up to just over a third of contributions from ostensibly full-time developers.

So it appears to be just a fact that people are developing this in their spare time. That doesn't mean they're less competent than paid developers; of course not. It simply means that compared to a big company, like MS or Apple, they just don't have the same level of cash money resources to hire the right kinds of people--UI design experts--and buy the right kinds of feedback--real-life user testing, focus groups--that big companies do. And that very much shows in these screenshots.

Alpha or not, criticism is essential for furthering the project. If everyone just sat around and said "whew, lots of hard work, good job guys!" to whatever crap any OSS dev produced, OSS would never progress. I want Gnome 3 to be better because I use Gnome every day!

  > If they didn't want to invite criticism,