“A couple weeks ago, I wrote some posts on GNOME Shell which
included a number of criticisms of the desktop environment that
will likely become Ubuntu’S default at some point in the future.
Jon McCann, lead designer for GNOME Shell, recently got in touch to
offer his responses to the problems I found with the new interface.
Here’s what he had to say.“In general, Jon’s message was that many of the criticisms I
made of GNOME (not Gnome, I’ve realized…) Shell were unfair,
given that its targeted release date remains six months in the
future. For example, Jon assured me that my experience with a laggy
interface was likely due to known bugs involving certain Intel
GPUs, which the GNOME developers are working on fixing.“More notably, Jon pointed to GNOME Shell’s Message Tray as the
answer to the difficulties I had switching between windows in the
absence of a taskbar. The Message Tray feature remains incomplete,
but this animation provides an idea of what it will look like.”