If you have to wait for a Linux desktop environment to improve over time into something that's fully usable, wait for a desktop other than GNOME 3's shell to improve.

I have used Fedora and GNOME since Fedora Core 4, which was almost 6 years ago. I even tested out GNOME shell in early alphas and liked the new interface.[1] Of course, there were plenty of annoyances, but I was giving the GNOME 3 team the benefit of the doubt because it was very early software.

A few months ago, I switched to LXDE. I am much happier in an environment that is closer to the traditional GNOME 2 experience than GNOME 3 is.[2] LXDE is not user friendly like GNOME and so it requires some basic customization (with text files) to get it working comfortably. On the other hand, GNOME 3 is user hostile when you want to do any customization at all!

GNOME 3 is nice when you use it exactly as the developers intend, but they purposefully make it hard to customize:

Do you want to set custom GTK themes on a per-application basis like you could in GNOME 2? Too bad -- that feature doesn't exist in GTK3 and the GTK2 command line magic that used to work no longer works in GNOME 3. I mean, it's not like some applications simply look horrible in the default theme while others pretty much require the default, right?[3]

Do you hate wasted space on your screen? Well, the padding is there to stay so you have to set the title bar font to a tiny size with a third-party semi-official customization application if you want to make the title bar a sane small size without touching source code. Big GUI elements are touch friendly, yes, but I am not using touchscreens and I don't want wasted space when I could devote more pixels to the actual content I want to focus on.[4]

Do you have two large desktop monitors? Too bad, the GNOME 3 experience isn't optimized for multi-monitor setups. They put more thought into touchscreen devices (where currently no one uses GNOME 3) rather than fairly common multi-monitor setups.[5]

There's a complete lack of meaningful customization in GNOME 3 and the tiny bit of customization that exists is via the GNOME Tweak Tool rather than integrated officially into the desktop environment's settings. This 'do not customize' attitude is a design preference and it's really annoying, especially when no software works flawlessly for all use cases. It seems like they really want to move all customization to random third party add-ons downloaded from the Internet via their website.

Don't get your hopes up for GNOME 3. A lot of the missing features are conscious design decisions that might never be fixed. For me, there's no one reason why I can't use GNOME 3, but there's just lots of constant minor annoyances I simply don't experience in other desktop environments. Most of these annoyances will take years to fix and many will never be fixed.[6] Again, none of these are irredeemable flaws, there are just many little faults and the anti-customization attitude of GNOME 3 makes those flaws considerably harder to deal with than they should be.

I wouldn't give up on Fedora, but I have definitely given up on GNOME 3.[7] Again, most of GNOME 3's barriers to customization (i.e. fixing their many annoyances) are deliberate decisions that will probably never change. GNOME demands you follow their One True Way of doing things. If I wanted to conform my workflow to some organization's opinions, I probably wouldn't be using Linux in the first place.

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[1] I was pleasantly surprised that the fancy version works even on my laptop, which has terrible Intel integrated graphics from years ago. My laptop barely handles anything that requires a graphics card, but it runs GNOME 3's new shell.

[2] LXDE doesn't have some features that GNOME 2 had, but LXDE also has some cool things that GNOME 2 didn't have. One cool feature I particularly like is being able to remove window border decorators. It's the little things that count. LXDE+Openbox have as many little details that I like as GNOME 3 has little details that annoy me.

[3] This was actually the last straw that sent me to LXDE. I spent days trying to either set an appropriate theme or figure out how to set themes for each application. The GTK3 theme for GNOME 3 simply doesn't work for all types of applications even though you can only use one for all of your currently running applications. Of course, the default themes for just about every other desktop environment seem to work fine for all popular applications first-party and third-party, so I really don't know why GNOME 3 has a complete lack of aesthetic taste. Maybe it's some subtle issue like the title bar background color in the window decorator matching the toolbar and menu bar background color.

[4] They also want you to constantly switch to a separate mode (the Activities view) to do many common tasks, like quick launching of applications that could easily be located as an icon on the top panel instead.

[5] I could get into more detail about all the minor annoyances here, but it would make this rant far too lengthy.

[6] It seems like they love the large icons and the massively huge window decorator title bar padding. Expect a user interface that works universally, even on device form factors you will never use GNOME on, to be a higher priority than one that works well on large desktop screens.

[7] I don't hate GNOME 3. I wouldn't have put this much effort into criticizing it (based on over a year of trying to like it) if I immediately hated GNOME 3. It's just that the GNOME team has a different target audience than me (or, really, hackers in general[8]) and it is more work customizing GNOME 3 to work the way I want it to than it is to customize LXDE. LXDE isn't perfect and it isn't polished, but I do expect desktops like LXDE and XFCE to get improvements and attention now that GNOME 3 has alienated most of GNOME 2's audience.

[8] The funny thing is that GNOME shell's target audience appears to be people who don't use desktop Linux and who probably will never use desktop Linux. They clearly aren't targeting Linux 'power users' with their design decisions. The issues that prevent desktop Linux from being used are market barriers (i.e. almost every laptop coming with Windows pre-installed (supply) and people being used to Windows after almost two decades of use (demand)) rather than technological or UI barriers. (Yes, I put a footnote in a footnote. I don't care.)