I have failed to report on my gnome-shell experiences. Well, I can sum it up pretty quickly: it was neat and promising and all that, but I ran into a rather annoying bug with alt-tab window switching where it would get confused as to what was the last window I selected. It is quite possible that this problem doesn't exist if one builds from the latest source, but I haven't had time to do that yet, so I'm back to running old fashioned Gnome again. Maybe when I upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04, I'll try it again, since the package is undoubtably newer there.
via live.gnome.org
I just discovered that I can do 'aptitude install gnome-shell' and then just run 'gnome-shell -r', and I can run the Gnome Shell now. We'll see if it turns out to be stable, but so far, it has completely fixed most of the UI things that bother me about Gnome. (I have been really hating the panel lately, too.)
Oh, and did I mention that running 'lg' from the run dialog brings up a JavaScript interpreter? (thanks, cheat sheet.)
So, liking the candy so far, we'll see if it actually is as stable as they claim. ("Stable enough for everyday use...")