I've loved GNOME 3 for as long as I've used it, but I've had (apparently) non-typical usage habits since before GNOME 1.x came out. For example, I know a lot of people hated the fact that GNOME 3 did away with the Win95-style taskbar at the bottom of the screen, but even under GNOME 2 I used to ditch it as quickly as possible.
For my purposes, GNOME 3 lets me easily dedicate workspaces to different tasks, it lets me easily open as many terminals and Vim windows as I like, and it lets me easily open two windows side-by-side (an editor with code and a terminal for running tests, or an editor with HTML and a browser for previewing, etc.) so I'm pretty pleased with it.
I'm a little worried about some of the changes GNOME 3 has gone through; as it migrates from traditional in-window menu-bars to a single button in the global bar at the top of the screen, that's probably going to put a crimp in my sloppy-mouse-focus habits. This new "header bars" concept probably isn't going to play very nicely with my custom title-bar-button-order setup (I prefer the traditional Mac close-at-top-left, zoom-at-top-right configuration). Still, I'll probably get used to it over time.
For my purposes, GNOME 3 lets me easily dedicate workspaces to different tasks, it lets me easily open as many terminals and Vim windows as I like, and it lets me easily open two windows side-by-side (an editor with code and a terminal for running tests, or an editor with HTML and a browser for previewing, etc.) so I'm pretty pleased with it.
I'm a little worried about some of the changes GNOME 3 has gone through; as it migrates from traditional in-window menu-bars to a single button in the global bar at the top of the screen, that's probably going to put a crimp in my sloppy-mouse-focus habits. This new "header bars" concept probably isn't going to play very nicely with my custom title-bar-button-order setup (I prefer the traditional Mac close-at-top-left, zoom-at-top-right configuration). Still, I'll probably get used to it over time.