I've been using GNOME 3 with the fallback mode for a while now, and wanted to see if I could start using GNOME Shell. Almost everything worked OK for me, but I was missing 2 features from GNOME 2:
- the dual screen behaviour (the secondary screen didn't use the workspaces)
- the static workspaces (or virtual desktops)
The first problem can easily be fixed:
gconftool-2 --set --type boolean \ /desktop/gnome/shell/windows/workspaces_only_on_primary true
Restart gnome-shell and you're done.
The second one has been trickier to fix. My first solution was to use a set of extensions for the shell : GNOME Shell Frippery. It does the job nicely, but to get the workspace switcher I'm used to (the thingy in the panel), I had to add a second panel. Too bad, it eats space, I didn't want that.
So I adapted the code to run the switcher widget in the main panel. I've pushed the two generated extensions to my git repository, hopping that this will be useful to others. A README file in the sources describes how to install and use the extensions.