I had tried Gnome-shell before and thought it was too sluggish in its transitions. But last night I downloaded a more recent copy from the launchpad PPA.
I found it vastly improved, but a couple things stood out as major weaknesses. The main one I want to mention (I'll leave the second one for now) is that unless you go to the Activities button you cannot see the active applications. At first when playing around I didn't notice it so much but after a while I found it annoying and time-consuming to do this -- I guess because since the dawn of the GUI OS (or at least my use of them) there has always been some kind of list of the tasks shown on the screen at all times. Once Gnome shell is officially released and bundled with distros, I don't see it being a long time before people start to see this as a slow system in terms of productivity. Don't get me wrong, for the most part I was actually quite excited about using a finished product of the shell. I mean loading programs, browsing drives, and finding recent documents is done brilliantly and these things are more quickly accessible than probably most alternative systems. It's just that something is lost when you don't have an active task list at all times. Think - switching programs. More clicks is more pain. I propose some kind of active apps/tasks list that is displayed at all times. I get the feeling that the developers want to keep the panel/task bar (whatever it is being called) clutter free, so they are not going to want program names splattered across it. I think the solution would be to have smallish icons of the active apps/tasks displayed next to the activities button. I believe this would help make the shell a solid product.
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