A lot of people complain about customization on both, so I just say: try Awesome WM. This window manager is very easy to use and very simple to customize, it really lives up to its name (awesome).
I use both Gnome Shell and Awesome WM on Arch Linux, I like both of them, although I've been using more and more Gnome Shell lately, partially because Gnome 3.4 is almost in the stable repositories, and I am very anxious for it.
For example, if I am working on a terminal and have firefox open, how much trouble would it be to switch between them (would alt + tab work ?).
I tried reading wiki-pages about tiling managers in general, but they are sparse on this kind of information.
http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/linux-dwm-window-manager-on-de...
Windows can be tiled, full screen ('monacle') or floating in dwm. You can alter the config file to associate a window type with an application, e.g. GIMP will always be floating.
You have a screen divided into a main pane on the left. I set mine to occupy about 65% of the width of a 1920by1080 screen. The right hand area is a 'stack' of other windows which appear as you invoke applications using dmenu (click super, type program name).
You can switch between the active window with the mouse (focus follows pointer) or using keyboard shortcuts (vi related in the stock version). You can also swap windows on the 'stack' in the right hand side into the main tile, so the window that was in the main tile goes onto the stack. You can also 'cycle' the windows through the tiles like a yank buffer.
The best bit was tags. Basically you have 9 workspaces, but it is possible to bring the windows in workspace 7 (say) into the stack in workspace 1.
The main problem I had was the issue of popup windows for tiled applications. Sometimes they were recognised and became floating windows, sometimes they opened in the main pane with the result that the main application window became the first on the stack, which was distracting.
There is also a shell extension for that, but it is still too crude for daily usage: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/28/gtile/
Despite Compiz's flaws Canonical did the right thing by sticking to and polishing an existing WM instead of creating yet another WM with its own weird flaws and bugs. Plus, I like wobbly windows :)
I've heard awesome things about Awesome. I need to give it a try in the near future. Thanks!
edit: Yes, also https://extensions.gnome.org/ is pretty neat.
Its worth mentioning that Ubuntu 12.04 is still in testing.
How does it compare to KDE? I used Gnome(2) for some time but it was really (and I mean really) bad when it comes to customization of basically anything. I then switched to KDE which I found to be great in this area. I didn't like the look (and with my limited taste couldn't help it much) but I loved I could customize virtually anything. Just few clicks in GUI. I've used gnome-shell briefly and I think you can mess around with the javascript to configure a lot of things. But there was almost no configuration for the users.
So, my question. How is it now, compared to KDE? Both Gnome and Unity. Are some 3rd party tools (I'd imagine there would be for the gnome-shell at least) which could help?
Gnome Shell has little to no options out of the box, but it has extension that do just that.
Unity recently added some basic options into the default (new tab in the appearance dialog). They didn't add a lot of options but just the ones I seem to need :)
Sure, even Metacity isn't going to be as configurable as... oh, Awesome or XMonad, but I've found it much more reliable than Compiz (I managed to completely break Unity once by playing with the Compiz configuration tool).
What in particular do you mean by "making managing windows easy"?
And while Metacity could be used as an emergency replacement with a good configuration, the Metacity/Mutter in Gnome 3 had serious trouble emulating all the keypresses I needed. Especially Mod4 (or win key) was very problematic and unfortunately I've settled on that key for anything window related many, many years ago.
[1] Now that I think of it, Unity also has Unity 2D which might support a regular window manager instead of a compositing one.
I don't know what graphics protocol we will be using then, but it will still speak some flavor of X.
By which I mean, there are problems with X11, but age is just a correlated factor, not a cause, so it doesn't help to say we need something newer. Weyland makes different design decisions, and some of them might turn out to be better in the long run and some of them might not.
(Personally, I expect Weyland's lack of a "window manager" process will annoy me vastly more than the protocol quirks of X11, which have mostly been papered over by GTK+ and Qt by now.)
1) Gnome Shell when installed along side Unity will have the Unity style 'rollover' scrollbars. These can be disabled, but that setting is desktop wide, so you lose the rollover scrollbars in your Unity session
2) Gnome Classic is a reasonable facsimile of Gnome 2 UI for end users who do not require extensive panel customisation or lots of applets. I'm thinking of the army of people who will upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04.4 to 12.04.x over the next year or so. I've tested the 'software update' upgrade process from 10.04 to 12.04 and it works really well. When 12.04 is released, the software update application in all 10.04 installations will provide a 'distribution upgrade' button. I imagine a lot of people will get a bit of a shock when they upgrade, go and have coffee and come back to Unity!
3) Unity2d is rather nice in my opinion and avoids the compiz issues that people sometimes see depending on their hardware. Unity2d now has HUD which is interesting.
4) If you install 12.04 command line from the netinstall iso, you can just apt-get gnome-core and get a relatively stock gnome-shell/gnome-classic desktop. You need to install some sound libraries and then choose your applications.
