Loving to Hate GNOME 3

You're going to hate GNOME. Really, trust me on this. You will absolutely despise it. The dumb thing starts up with an empty screen. There is no menu. The intrepid among you will stumble across that "Activities" thing in the upper left. You might even click and see... another empty screen. Seriously! What is up with these empty screens. How do I actually get at my *stuff*? Try it. Go ahead, give it a try right now. See what I mean? Let it out - a nice primal scream of frustration. Good. Now take a deep breath and let's explore why I'm wrong. Huh? Put on your thinking caps. Let's look at the computer like it's your personal secretary. No, not Bill Clinton's secretary. Get your mind out of the gutter. Your secretary. You're sitting at your desk. Papers spread out in front of you. A nice leather chair. A picture of the wife and kids in the corner. Wham! It hits you. The idea of the century. This will catapult your entire company onto the world stage. You mumble an order to take notes and start blabbering away. Your secretary simply carries on whatever you had her doing before. Why? Because she's in the other room, dummy. You didn't get her attention. And she has no idea you wanted her to do something else. Now no rational human being would do this. You would immediately yell her name, get her attention, give the order, _then_ start dictating. So why do you expect the computer to be any different? The computer is an electronic secretary. And when you want it to do something new, you have to get its attention first. That is what the Activities button does - tells the computer that you want something. The computer starts paying attention. So tell it what you want. Start typing the command. Whoa! A bunch of icons pop up onto the screen. Those icons match what you type. The more you type, the more the computer narrows down what you want. Sounds a lot like a human secretary. It learns your habits, putting the most likely choices up front. Click an icon to finish the command. And the computer obeys. You would never expect a human secretary to list all of her job functions every time you grab her attention. That's silly. Yet this is exactly what a menu does. Menus are the computer's list of job functions. Menus make a very poor secretary. We have been spoiled by decades of poor user interfaces. We think of the computer like a hammer - a tool to wield. And that's wrong. The computer is a secretary. Change your expectations, and that crazy GNOME interface makes a lot more sense.