Another pretty big problem with the Gnome Project recently is that they've made Gnome less modular. Gnome used to be a collection of associated software- you ha

Another pretty big problem with the Gnome Project recently is that they've made Gnome less modular. Gnome used to be a collection of associated software- you had a window manager, a panel, a compositor, panel applications and widgets, a settings-daemon, a keyring manager, a screensaver, etc. If you wanted something other than what Gnome wanted to provide, you swapped out metacity and compiz for xmonad. Or you bolted the settings-daemon onto another window manager. It's been subtle, but with every 3.x version of gnome, a little more of the functionality just gets rolled into gnome-shell and is unable to run without it. Most recently, with 3.8, media keys are no longer handled by gnome-settings-daemon- you can now only have gnome's media keys if you're running gnome-shell. I know a lot of people are going to say "well, you're not using the software for its intended purpose. it's not their fault for breaking it." And that's true, but modularity a big part of the Unix philosophy and this is Gnome showing the Unix way the door.