I'm on Debian with Gnome 3.8 and been quite happy overall. I was recently working on a Gnome 2.x machine and couldn't believe how terrible and difficult to use

I'm on Debian with Gnome 3.8 and been quite happy overall. I was recently working on a Gnome 2.x machine and couldn't believe how terrible and difficult to use it all seemed – even though I used 2.x for many years. I'm not sure where all the Gnome 3 negativity came from. But I understand that a small detail can be enough to derail your experience with it. In my case, that would be the "Launch new instance" behaviour: clicking on the launcher focused on the existing instance, instead of creating a new one. But with a tiny gnome shell extension it was resolved. I have other extensions installed, but that's really the only one I want to keep. I think the flak and hate they received was disproportionate… But then, pretty much the same happened with KDE3->KDE4, Win2k->WinXP, WinXP->Vista, Win7->Win8, and more recently with iOS6->iOS7. About the only time where a major UI change was introduced without too much trouble, was the MacOS9->MacOSX Public Beta transition; but I suspect there was just as much grumbling from the people on OS9, it just may have been that their voices got drowned out by the excitation of the new users attracted by the new "lickable" interface.