Gnome 3 vs Ubuntu Unity.
As there was lot of talk about Unity which is released with Ubuntu 11.04. I tried for 2 days when Ubuntu 11.04 released. I did not find it much user friendly. From last two months I am using GNOME 3 on OpenSUSE 11.4. I liked GNOME 3 very much. In the beginning it looked something different. But as I kept on using it , I found it good. The only problem I face with it when I open too many windows. I think you will have to use workspace efficienty. The other thing to keep in mind that it is keyboard centric rather than mouse centric. You will have to use keyboard shortcuts more often than mouse. It's hardware integration looks better than Unity so graphics it better than Unity ( at least on my laptop ). There is talk that Ubuntu 11.10 is going to include GNOME 3. I installed first beta of Ubuntu 11.10 on virtual machine. I installed GNOME shell as well but unfortunately could not login into GNOME shell for some unknown reason. Since it is beta 1 and I read some where that 11.10 beta 1 has unstable GNOME 3, I did not try much. But GNOME 3 look to me much better than Unity. I am using it from last two months on OpensUSE.
Following are some useful links if you want to try.
Install GNOME 3 on OpenSUSE 11.4
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:GNOME_3.0 ( One click install did not work for me, I installed using text install)
GNOME 3 cheatsheet at Arch Linux.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME
Adding application to GNOME 3 launcher
http://bloggezmoy.com/2011/05/17/how-to-add-an-application-to-the-gnome-3-application-launcher/
Note that : Be careful while adding GNOME 3 extensions, it crashed for some extensions for me in the beginning.
In the end my vote is for GNOME 3 against Unity.