What I'd like to suggest is that all Linux platform developers seriously consider going the opposite way and providing real "computers" to those holdouts, like

What I'd like to suggest is that all Linux platform developers seriously consider going the opposite way and providing real "computers" to those holdouts, like me, who still need to get real work done and know how to navigate a real file system and even [gasp] a command line. I hope a gnome dev reads this. Some of the gnome developers came and visited us onsite earlier this year. They did it to "study real users" and get feedback on the gnome3 UI. Some background: we were representing ~500+ Real Paying Gnome Users, not some nebulous fantasy persona that gnome hopes to get as a user in the future. We are the real customers. We are high-end computer graphics researchers, software developers, and some of the most talented CG artists in the world. We are content creators, not content consumers. My gut feeling after the meeting was that they were so stuck in their decisions that they really didn't care about the feedback we had for them. They spent their time defending their positions with platitudes like, "well, you have to try it first. Maybe it's not that bad". No one liked the magic hot-corner activities window. That's not how we work. The gnome3 philosophy seems to be centered around single applications that consume the entire window, and no configuration. Our workflow is having lots of separate terminals, windows, and a mix of applications running at once. Our world views are drastically different. My simple question, "if you move the menu bar to the top, and we all use sloppy-focus, doesn't that mean that if there's a window in-between the active window and the top of the screen that we'll lose focus as we try to move the mouse up to the top menubar?", was met with, "well, we didn't think that through. Yes, there might be problems with sloppy focus. <silence>". Uggh. It's gotten to the point where we are afraid of what's going to happen when RHEL7 comes around and gnome3 is the default. We are paying customers and we don't want gnome3. I love everything redhat does for the community, but I can't help but get a sense that they are cannibalizing their current users in hope of gaining some nebulous lowest-common-denominator user in exchange. I really don't know what's going to happen, but XFCE looks like a serious alternative now. What if redhat won't support us if we use XFCE on the desktop? Well, we might have to search for a competitor. Who's the competition? Who's target customer is the high-end Linux desktop user? If that's you, I'd like to talk to you.