In the past three years I've seriously used Gnome 2, awesome, xmonad, XFCE, Openbox, KDE, and Gnome 3. For window managers without Desktop Environments I genera

In the past three years I've seriously used Gnome 2, awesome, xmonad, XFCE, Openbox, KDE, and Gnome 3. For window managers without Desktop Environments I generally rolled my own, but used GNOME DE under xmonad. What got me started on all those was that early Gnome 3 had major problems with multi-monitor, and in general lack of finish/configurability. I am using Gnome 3.8 on Fedora 19 now, and it is great. I'm very productive in it, and in my opinion it's the most polished UI. I run a three-monitor setup and program mostly. That said, I would have chucked it without gnome-tweak-tool. GNOME 3 has brought back some of the configurability it lacked originally. Personally I use it to set Sloppy window focus, turn off dynamic workspaces and set 4 static, and make keyboard shortcuts for just about everything. As for command-line configurability, I run 'gsettings list-recursively | sort > gs-before.txt' before running gnome-tweak-tool and then after to compare to see what the settings names are. I then use that to create a 'post-install' config file so my changes are documented and if I reinstall I don't have to manually flip buttons. For example, to set sloppy window focus mode: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences focus-mode 'sloppy' Anyway, so far so good with GNOME 3.8, and am looking forward to Fedora 20 and GNOME 3.10.