InNeedOfRefactor -- this needs a clean-up to 
Wiki:DocumentMode
These are some random thoughts on GNOME version 2.2. I'm using the backported unofficial .debs for Debian 3.0 (woody). These points are supposed to be a comparison against gnome 1.4.
Nice font aliases (sans, serif) and default settings to automatically use my installed Microsoft TrueType fonts.
Hidden lots of the highly customisable tweaking stuff. Mostly a good idea, although some of them that "advanced users" might want just aren't anywhere any more. (see below). Preferences/Control Center is a lot slicker, with preference groups (eg Desktop, Advanced).
"Tool-tip" comments over most things. Much better help everywhere, and Help just works. Maybe this is just due to debian package dependencies, but I found (in gnome 1.4) that it assumed you had certain programs installed, and either quietly failed to work (eg from the gnome menu if no "gnome-help-browser" was installed) or displayed raw html as text (if you had nautilus but not galeon-nautilus) installed, or galeon gave errors such as "ghelp: bad protocol" or similar, etc etc.
Not really a gnome-specific thing, but having support for multi-media keyboards (that I always thought were windows-only) was a nice touch.
Mostly things that will piss off advanced users who already know what they're doing.
Often you have no idea when to single click and when to double click - still needs immediate feedback eg clicking on items in the Preferences dialog...
gdm still defaults to starting X with 8bpp or something crappy. (debian-specific default config maybe?)
character sets/locales encodings:
The "window list" applet (taskbar) now shows all windows, maximised or minimised. You used to be able to tell it to only show minimised windows. This is very annoying as it quickly fills up.
Also (or perhaps worse), it displays the window class rather than title for minimised windows. For example, my xterms all get a title of the current command, or current working directory. But on minimising, the window list entry merely says "xterm", which isn't helpful when you have more than one minimised xterm. -- Update -- I just noticed today that other applications such as galeon show the title when minimised, so maybe it only happens when xterm is minimised (or non-gnome apps).
Metacity: can't enable viewport/workspace edge-flipping? I couldn't find it...
Can't configure sloppy focus and DON'T raise-on-click. The sloppy focus doesn't behave the way an experienced unix user would expect.
And what I feel is a fundamental problem for unskilled users is the maximise button behaviour. Some apps (eg galeon) try to be helpful by remembering what size the window had when you last quit. But if you maximise the window and then quit, the next time you start the app it will be maximum size. Unfortunately metacity isn't smart enough to determine this and clicking Maximise will toggle between the current size (max) and maximum. This is one thing I've seen that confuses novice users. In the past I've got around this by setting up these apps for them (eg galeon) by getting the window manager to "remember" the dimensions, so each time the app is started it uses the reasonable defaults I set. Unfortunately metacity doesn't appear to have any "remember size/state/etc" features -- at least not easily found from the title bar buttons.
How the fsck do you change your window manager? I don't like metacity! There's no "save current session" setting that I could find. There's no configure which window manager, etc. I did it from the command line, but that's not a solution for "typical users". Back to good ol' sawfish for me!
No other page links to GNOME2 yet.
