One of the things that has kept me away from gnome until now is the lack of a common, central place for configuration. This was bad in the old days, but after the advent of compiz
, mutter
and dconf
, and the unofficial tweak utils (gnome-tweak
, ubuntu-tweak
, unsettings
, etc.), it's even more confusing.
Especially when things don't work as expected. Some keyboard shortcuts are set in one place, some in others; some are taken over from one vanilla gnome to Unity, others seem to go unnoticed. Maybe they conflict with some other setting, but there is no notification to that effect. Etc.
I've also experienced, when playing around with different flavors of GNOME (Gnome 2, Gnome 3, Unity, Gnome Shell, Cinnamon, etc.), that sometimes changes in one of them will have no effect on the others -- sometimes they will mess them up completely (or cause a revert to the default upon next login).
So, to get to the question: Can someone point me to a survey of how the various GNOMEs relate to each other -- to the various backends/systems, and to the configuration frontends? Which configurations in one (say Gnome Shell) will have effects on others (say Unity)?