WTF: Ubuntu, Debian and Gnome

After my rant on Ubuntu a few years ago it actually improved quite a
bit. You still had loads of mysterious processes running, but at
least they advanced things to the point of not slowing the desktop
down (or maybe hardware just caught up), all the while keeping the
same basic interface. I suppose they had gone just too long without
messing things up, so in comes Unity (or Gnome3 if you are running
the current Debian testing default desktop), and things are back to
slow, clunky and unusable. At least for me - I tried it and
abandoned it after a few days. Worse, the interface is radically
changed, with no fallback. But hey, it looks good!

I can't complain too much, at least Ubuntu has Xubuntu, and Debian,
well Debian just needs a minimal install, then you can add x-
windows and your desktop of choice. It's still disappointing,
however, that the default desktop in both is so broken.