Update 05/08/2012: The Mint people may have their own reasons for forking various GNOME components, but it seems that the removal of features in Nautilus was a direct reason for the creation of Nemo:
http://www.webupd8.org/2012/08/nemo-linux-mint-team-forks-nautilus.html
There are a lot of things which are yet to come to Gnome.
It's becoming increasingly clear that the Gnome people are going to push their ideas on the distros using Gnome regardless of whether the changes make sense or not. My main issue is still the destruction of gnome-screenshot, but it's clear that there are other things afoot that will make many of us unhappy. See e.g. nautilus
Actually, GNOME 3 is mostly fine. It's the removal of functionality from some of the GNOME applications which bothers me the most.
Going to KDE, XFCE, Xmonad, LXDE etc. won't bring me back gnome-screenshot. When it comes to Evolution, Epiphany etc. there are plenty of good alternatives. But Shutter etc. don't cut it when it comes to replacing gnome-screenshot. Nautilus, to me, is a good file manager and I prefer it to e.g. dolphin, thunar etc. for various reasons (dolphin because it's QT, thunar because...I don't even remember. Maybe I should have a look at it again...)
In all fairness, a subsection of the users will not care or maybe even like changes that I hate. Change isn't bad. Bad changes are bad. Change for the sake of change is bad.
Anyway. A temporary solution is to freeze gnome and not allow upgrades until you are sure that you won't be trading higher version numbers for reduced functionality
.
Also, some might like the Mac-like idea of putting menus at the top of the screen, while most people using a desktop-sized screen will be severely unhappy with this (mouse has to travel a lot further).
I suppose the idea is that you're only using one application per desktop at a time BUT WHY WAS THIS EVER THOUGHT TO BE THE WAY PEOPLE WORK?
Really, designing with non-work uses (chat/browsing) in mind seems a bit counter-productive. Literally.
Wikipedia has a list of the gnome applications which are the things that might get fiddled with. Basically, google for upcoming changes and prevent the heck out of them.
Early warning about stuff about to be changed in GNOME 3.6:
see e.g.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEzMzY
empathy
clutter
evolution
mutter
nautilus
Additional stuff to consider freezing
gnome-screenshot
gnome-shell
epiphany-browser
evince
Again, change may be good, but we've been burned before, so better to freeze stuff now, and make deliberate decisions about what changes to allow once they've been tested.
So how to freeze specific packages?
sudo su
echo "empathy hold"|dpkg --set-selections
echo "epiphany-browser hold"|dpkg --set-selections
echo "evince hold"|dpkg --set-selections
echo "gnome-shell hold"|dpkg --set-selections
echo "gnome-screenshot hold"|dpkg --set-selections
echo "mutter hold"|dpkg --set-selections
echo "mutter-common hold"|dpkg --set-selections
echo "nautilus hold"|dpkg --set-selections
Note that this may hold other packages, which list the above packages as dependencies, back as well. Still, better to make informed choices.
