After Ubuntu switched to Unity I decided to jump ship to Linux Mint. Now Mint and most of the other big distros have gone Gnome 3, I'm left frustrated. These frustrations would be even worse if I'd chosen Fedora or SUSE as they don't offer the gnome shell extensions that make life bearable.
All the progress that was made with Gnome 2 and Compiz just seems to have been thrown away. The compiz-effects combined with Gnome 2 made for an awesome combination that rivalled anything I saw in Windows 7 or Mac OSX. They also kept me productive. Even Windows 8 will provide both a classic look and feel as well as there new Metro UI. With the exception of KDE based distros, Mint are the only distro that are trying to provide a choice to its consumers out of the box.
I don't know what has gone on with Nautilus but they have succeeded in making a newer version worse than the version that came before. However, that is a rant for another day.
The new modal dialogs (a "feature" of gnome 3) have been really annoying me lately so I went on a hunt to find out how I could revert back to the traditional style of dialog. You know they type of dialog with a window bar that allows you to move it around the screen. Seriously everyone I know can deal with this concept. Let the developer choose the intent!
The solution is simple: gconf-editor to the rescue. Just open gconf-editor and untick /desktop/gnome/shell/windows/attach_modal_dialogs. Press Alt + F2, type r and press Enter (reloads gnome shell). Now you have the normal behavior back.
