Debian's jessie GNOME packages were also woefully out of date until the past 2 weeks. You can finally run GNOME 3.8 which was released over 7 months ago. At this rate they'll always been at least 1 stable version behind and probably end up at 2 behind by the time jessie is frozen next year.
It is not like gnome is adding any new functionality on the latest ones.
I need a rather unusual setup for work. I use focus-follow-mouse. But clicks do not raise windows unless i'm also holding the move window modifier (flag key).
I was unable to do that simple setting with gnome3 for years and always reverted back to XFCE or gnome2.
But now, since a couple months ago, with the effort from the community redoing their work via the extension gnome site, i can finally have that setup on gnome 3. even on the "old" versions that debian uses (i run untainted debian7). So i completely fail to see your point. Even more so as latest gnomes broke some extensions, screwing the community over yet again. Had debian be on the bleeding edge i'd probably be waiting for some extensions to be ported yet again.
gnome is a project that teaches that upgrading blindly is dumb.
That's the way debian works, to make sure changes are thoroughly tested. It probably doesn't work for gnome 3, as it gets gradually more usable over the years.
Speaking of gnome in debian, I have managed to make gnome 3 tolerable with a couple of changes, one to disable the global mac-style menu, and an extension to completely hide the top and bottom bars, called "Panel Settings".
One thing I quite like is the speed at which I can launch apps with gnome 3 and an ssd, with the first few letters of an apps name.
Although I have just noticed my gedit preferences menu item has disappeared, because the gnome menu that comes up next to 'activities' isn't visible when I hide the panel... Maybe it is time to check out xcfe again, or more likely, tweak my gnome config further to disable that menu placement as well. I'm attached to gnome, I think, because it does things like powering down external drives via the "file manager", (whatever thats called now), which xcfe didn't do when I tried it last year.
It's worse than that. Gnome-shell (probably the most visible part of Gnome) is still at 3.4 in Jessie. It just hit Sid last week or something.
That said, I've used Gnome 3 since it was still in development and grew to love it. After using 3.8 (on Ubuntu Gnome 13.10), I think 3.8's improvements over 3.6 are pretty significant. It feels lighter, faster, smoother overall. The newly redesigned apps (e.g. evince) feel extremely well designed too.
Same here. I'm a big fan of Gnome Shell nowadays. Simple, fast, beautiful. No more hours of tweaking my default install of $FAVORITE_DISTRO until it's usable. Love it.
