After using GNOME 3.6.0 for an entire day, I can say that it has been a stable and productive computing experience. I still experience software crashes, but that is due to the fact that I am using Ubuntu 12.10 64 bit Beta 2 or Release Candidate. I installed a bunch of updates and this seemed to have quelled the crashes quite a bit. Everything seems stable for the moment. I also find GNOME 3.6.0 to be simpler and easier to use. There is less mousing around and fewer mouse clicks needed to use GNOME and that is an improvement in my opinion. It's smoother and faster while being more responsive as a result. There is a natural fluidity and a cohesive look and feel to GNOME 3.6.0 that makes it a more polished desktop environment. This is one of the better major GNOME releases and it is certainly growing on me the more that I use it. K Desktop Environment 4.9.2 using Qt 4.8.3 used to be my favorite desktop environment, but GNOME is ever so slightly edging past it now. There is a certain sense of familiarity to GNOME that I find to be appealing.
GNOME 3.6.1 will be released on October 15th, 2012. I plan to install the updates and test it out again to see what has changed or what has been fixed or what has been improved.
GNOME 3.6.0 is my favorite desktop environment closely followed by KDE 4.9.2 and Ubuntu Unity is in final place for now. As newer versions and updates along with new features and more improvements become available in the future, I will update my opinions.
I'm still test driving Gnome 3.6 (Ubuntu Gnome Respin) on my spare partition. The Dock Extension (for the panel) still doesn't work (nor does the Deepin version). The lack of this single extension still renders Gnome unusable to me.
In the meantime, I remembered how to bind the Gnome Overview to the middle mouse button -- means I don't have to swipe the *$^%#& hot corner every time I want to switch to a different application.
If I could figure out how to use the scroll button to shade windows, I might even consider switching to Gnome Shell on my secondary laptop. Maybe.
So far Gnome 3 has been the best so far for me. Tomorrow is another day. Bring on the updates!
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