For the past month, I’ve been piloting Gnome 3 and Fedora 15.
I’m pretty happy with the state of things now. I have to admit that in the beginning, I was cursing loudly asking for my desktop and panel back, but I’m used to the dash area and window picker now. The search feature (which is similar to Spotlight in OSX) is really useful and I end up using that for the majority of my tasks. I also find the notification system very well done along with the ability of dealing with messages without changing windows. In the end, all I can say is I find myself using Fedora more over my pretty MacBook Air for the majority of my tasks. I’m almost as productive as I was with Gentoo and Rat Poision back in the day 🙂
On a side note, when will “desktop Linux” realize that no one wants to write applications in Gtk, Qt or Python. And by no one, I mean there’s just a small slice of developers capable of writing applications in those languages (I don’t care how many Python snippets you provide). The first one to allow applications be developed in a more popular and saner language, preferably a combination of HTML/JS/CSS will do wonders to their respective communities. I think the direction Gnome is going with Seed but they need to still make things easier for folks.
Anyways, if you want to learn more about the Gnome 3 changes, check out this wiki page. The final release of Fedora 15 should be out in a couple of weeks, but if you can’t wait, grab the pre-release which has been working great for me.