Gnome 3 completely borked my system of 8 years running on an Thinkpad R50e I was happy with. There really is no excuse for what happened. There was no cure either. I am done. Writing from a mac now.
I read that blog post and all I can do is shake my head. They seem to be fighting the same old monsters for the last 12 years. The list of reasons on the post sickens me.
What do you mean by borked? Did it actually cause damage somehow or did it just not run well? I wouldn't expect something so resource intensive to work well on that computer just as I would be amazed if you could smoothly run mountain lion on an 8 year old mac. It's actually a major strength of linux that you can run modern software versions on even extremely outdated hardware; you just need to choose an appropriate desktop environment.
Borked: Unable to boot into the GUI, unable to downgrade properly or go back to the earlier version of Gnome. Tried doing stuff manually, ran into a bunch of dependency issues, gave up. So then I loaded up XFCE and after a while of using it, saw a mac, liked it, and moved. Also I guess I had moved on from the time I was more of a hobbyist and just wanted a dependable system. I had backed up all my config files just in case as well.
XFCE continues to be the only usable UI for laptops IMHO. XFCE actually rescued said R50e, and yes, I am amazed by the fact that it is usable. But given that I had been using Gnome for years and years, I personally was not comfortable with XFCE. The mac gives me what I want, a unixy system and a stable GUI without the hoop jumping tricks.
I read that blog post and all I can do is shake my head. They seem to be fighting the same old monsters for the last 12 years. The list of reasons on the post sickens me.