Migrating from XFCE to Gnome 3 on OSS 11.4

Gnome 3 has been in the news for quite a while now.
Some people like change, others don't.
By migrating from XFCE to GNOME3 I was able to test the package management of OpenSuSE 11.4 some more.

These are the steps I followed:
- Open the website http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:GNOME_3.0
- Click on the correct "One-Click-Install" (in my case the 32-bit one)

- Make sure you also open a terminal to reboot the system properly when finished

Before installing, you can recognize the XFCE-desktop

- Just click "next" and away we go. The whole process took less than 15 minutes.

- YaST will download all packages before installing them. (Good, because at some point I lost network connection as you can see on the screenshot below.)

- Never mind the permissions errors you see, they get solved later on automatically.

- Done... now you just have to reboot and when logging in, make sure you select GNOME as session.

- You can keep both XFCE and GNOME3 on the same machine but I wanted to remove it. (testing, testing..)

- This was a little bit tricky. Go to YaST -> Software Management -> Patterns and select the XFCE (it should still be selected). You cannot uncheck it, you have to remove the xfce packages manually, resolve all dependencies and only then you will see the checkbox untagged like on the screenshot.
I did not remove ALL packages from XFCE-pattern, just the ones I know are XFCE-only. This is where the YaST tool needs some more attention...

First Impressions...
- Yast2 menu items are not present in the Applications dock, go to ALT+F2 and enter "gnomesu /sbin/yast2"
- You loose some screen space due to big status/menu bars
- install the gnome tweak utility to change the default font settings (very nice feature is that you can change all font sizes at the same time with a slider)
- No performance problems
- Very clean (no icons on the background)
- Good default keybindings
- OSX-like
- The OpenSuSE branding is not yet added (no green colors ;-) )

Some more impressions will follow but for now, I like it.