Last time I tried Gnome I was struggling with the inability to remap shortcuts to clear a way for using my Emacs bindings without the desktop interfering. The c

Last time I tried Gnome I was struggling with the inability to remap shortcuts to clear a way for using my Emacs bindings without the desktop interfering. The ctrl-shift-f for a global search sounds like a generally bad idea that will conflict with a lot applications. Or maybe it doesn't impose itself on applications but only the desktop, I don't know. But one thing I know that if I disagree with Gnome developers then I'll have a hard time working around and hacking my own way in. I've usually ended up starting to patch Gnome/Gtk components at which points I just realize that it is absolutely futile and I give up. Gnome used to be the marvel of configurability. Around Gnome2 time there were gazillion settings and options that you could change, and even more via gsettings/gconf. Then the UI was gradually dumbed down but you could still configure most things. "Tweak" tools appeared. Now it seems I bump into an ideological obstacle left and right, and even the tweak tools won't let me change anything much besides some cosmetic properties. Mate has some rough edges but it's pretty much the only thing that still works for a power user that wants an UI with a traditional window manager of my choice instead of whatever tiling configuration is in hype this year.