I love the description of the “bring back the skull”
@Wayne: There are ultracompact themes available, which I’m using at the moment. They remove a lot of whitespace.

I also think highly of the idea that Gnome can identify to you which programs are using drives that you are trying to unmount, and give you the option to force-quit them. Also, things that root has mounted manually SHOULD be unmountable from the desktop, although obviously it would need to fire a gksu prompt.

I love Gnome, but the GTK “Save As” dialogs need to stop treating your selection of a file as an assumption that you want your new file to have the same name. Even frigging clicking on the “Desktop” icon causes the filename to go completely blank. You know what idea I loved from RISC-OS? You have a tiny new window with an icon and a space for you to put in a filename. You type the filename and drag the icon to the file browser where you want the thing saved to. It’s simple, intuitive, and makes so much sense.

Having used Gnome since 1999, and switched forth and back to other desktop managers, I am again back at it.
And still, since 2.0 I am afraid, I’d rather see most of the developers leaving the project. Not for doing a bad job, but for the wrong mindset. There is too much of an arrogant nannying style, and too many instances of a type “What do you [ignorant] want?! That is easily done by gconf, with the registry key app->live->howdo” or “Wrong. Just press Ctrl+F11, type ‘do it’ into the pop-up, and press Enter”.
As long as this kind of mentality prevails, I am afraid, someone else will have world dominiation. Maybe even KDE4 will roll over GNOME and wipe it from all but geeks’ desktops. Which would be seriously bad for me, because their icons are so *ugly*.

No. 2 should be:
support for thumnails of raw images in Nautilus.

XP and Vista, with all their faults have those features, and I miss them.