Semi OT: New laptop is in

Have Linux loaded. And windows 7 pro (actually upgraded from the windows 7 home they had). Ok … I like it. It is very fast. About as heavy (maybe a little more so than the Dell). Keyboard is a chicklet style. I’m ok with this, Dell had a more standard type of keyboard. I can touch type on this without problem. If anything, I like it a little better. Graphics are awesome. Obviously more oompf here. More ram is great. Simplified my disk layout too. Yeah. Its nice. What I don’t like? Gnome 3 shell. If I want a Mac, I am going to buy a Mac. Even with the shell extensions, yeah, it kind of sucks. Gnome 2 was (and is) fine for me. Gnome 3 doesn’t simply have a learning curve to deal with, it has an attitude, a philosophy, and an operational concept that the attitude defends, which doesn’t quite mesh well with what I want. I put Linux Mint 12 on there. Played with 11, thought I would like 12. I don’t. Ubuntu has drunk from a similar well with its Unity interface. I am guessing Fedora has as well (FC14 and 15 were trending down that path). Linux desktop has gone from a powerful and configurable tool to … something … else. Great for tablets maybe. Not so great for power users? Its not the learning curve, I can adapt. Its the loss of functionality, our way or the highway approach. Can’t say I like that so much. This is the first time in a very long time that I can say that I think the windows experience might be better on the system than the Linux experience. Just because of the crappy desktop. Rethinking lots of this, will see if I can go to an Icewm or similar desktop. Its not change that I fear. Its loss of utility. Gnome 3 has lost huge amounts of utility.