As I said before: put your favorite apps in the bar for favorite apps. Accessing those is as simple as sliding your mouse to the activities field (no click even ;)) and then down to your app. That’s actually less action than in GNOME 2 menus when you had to open a menu hierarchy first. For all other apps, don’t even bother using your mouse. Keep your hands on the keyboard, press your windows key (or whatever you have there), then the first two or three letters of your app’s name (it doesn’t even have to be the first letters, just something you remember). It’ll probably be the first guess of GNOME 3 (it is for me most of the time anyways), so you just hit enter. That’s so much fastern than looking through a hierarchy of menus which you’d have to look through all over again for those apps you don’t use regularly.

Really. GNOME 3 isn’t perfect yet. I use 3.2 here mostly and I’m waiting for 3.4. I’m not a version junky. But this really made my life easier. Clinging to old behavior is nice in an environment that is complex to change, like big businesses or whatever, but at home, as a linux nerd, get over yourself and admit that the world moved on — and that’s definitely forward, not backwards here. :)

So that’s all the story. Maybe that’s because I’m 30+ now, and am looking for some stabilization in computer environment also.

It’s still so: throw the pointer to the top-left hot corner, click “Applications”, click on the desired application.

Ok, maybe you have to scroll or add another click on the right section panel (which responds to the mouse wheel, if you prefer) but navigating a big list (or tree) should not be a frequent operation.

In GNOME 2 it would take 2 clicks to access every application.