Labeled by some as unintuitive and a usability nightmare, GNOME Shell used to be crap. Not anymore. GNOME released version 3.12 of its popular desktop environment recently, and it refines the Gnome Shell concept yet again. It managed to pass the usable threshold a few releases ago and hasnt stopped improving since. It might take a while before this new version is packaged into your favorite distributions next release, but heres a preview of what changes you can expect.