As someone who used Gnome 1 in school, tried KDE 1 and 2 on the family PC for a while, then later switched their private PC to that same Hardy Heron Ubuntu Gnome 2 install and moved from there to Gnome 3.2 or 3.4 when it became available in Ubuntu - this was nice, the cheese theme especially.

I don’t really know what kind of demographic misses switching to different window managers in this way though. I never did. But I don’t really get the tiling window manager craze either - that is certainly easy enough to set up as a different session.

A few things he missed though:

• Previewing media files in the Nautilus side panel.
• Gimp had no menu bar, most everything needed to be done from the context menu. The saving grace was that most menus could be torn off into little palette-style windows though.
• The Gimp installation with the orange window he shows is just a user setup wizard. I remember that e.g. at my school, it was important to fix the DPI setting for our monitors on the first run because the window manager wasn’t reliable on that front.
• I believe there was a sliding animation when hiding a desktop panel with the <|> buttons at the side. That was nice at the time.
• I am not completely sure whether Sawfish had that feature or whether it was only available on the KDE window manager, but you could double-click the title bar of windows to hide the window content and show only the title bar.