Geoffrey Leach writes:
Having tried (briefly!) gnome-shell on Fedora 14, its clear that I
won't be using it any time soon. Seems to me that the obvious solution
is to replace it with (my preferred) metacity as the default window
manager. Has anyone tried this?
The metacity fallback desktop on F15 is just gnome-shell lite; gnome-shell
without desktop effects.
Your best plan B is XFCE. It's a reasonable replacement. The biggest problem
with XFCE is the lack of PackageKit integration, so you'll have to run it
manually every week, or so, to pull in the latest updates. Other than that,
it's a fine alternative.