Honestly gnome shell is the greatest thing ever. My focus and productivity skyrocketet. I see how people who would prefer to run XP dont like it. But no reason to make it bad.
My productivity went up when i stopped arguing about DEs online. It is currently taking a dip, though.
I havent worked in a week. So best time to argue DEs :)
I can agree on this, the booster was super key to show all window, I've never been this fast to context switch between window.
Yeah exactly. And super to start apps. Find documents. Its all just a super away
Xfce, kde (possibly unity, maybe enlightenment) can do the former. Dmenu (probably unity, kde, other standalone programs) and enlightenment can do the latter (Enlightenments Everything launcher is amazing).
You are making a fallacy in saying that old equals bad/ugly. XFCE is keeping it oldschool and can still look amazing (xubuntu looks great IMO).
There's much to talk about when talking about GUI things. Much indeed. Many things are even quantifiable, instead of being pure personal preference. Just remember that Microsoft spent a lot of effort into studies in what culminated to be windows95, while many other projects did not (the study that ended up being gnome3 is a joke in comparison).