Assuming that you found Gnome 2 more acceptable than MS Win 8 or 10, 
etc., may I strongly recommend MATE?  I have this GUI/manager installed 
on all my SL 7 boxes, as well as on a Mint box for a colleague (the 
laptop in that case came pre-installed with Mint -- leaving it was much 
less work than starting from scratch with the current EL 7 installation 
DVD). Note that for full functionality, one must install essentially all 
of the MATE RPMs otherwise small but convenience-necessa bits are missing.

Yasha Karant

On 10/13/2016 08:41 AM, James M. Pulver wrote:
> FWIW whenever I boot Kali and get stuck with Gnome 3 (at least that's 
> what I think that abomination is), I can't do much of anything. It's 
> actively worse than Win 10 / Mac OSX, though part of it might be the 
> live CD part of it. In day to day I have converted many people to 
> XFCE4 which seems far more sane, in _my_ experience.
>
> James Pulver
> CLASSE Computer Group
> Cornell University
>
> On 10/13/2016 04:51 AM, David Sommerseth wrote:
>> On 13/10/16 03:21, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>>> On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 1:08 PM, MAH Maccallum
>>> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>> Thanks, Andrew. I will check those possibilities. A problem
>>>> with the graphics drivers seems likely in that I get the same
>>>> result with my default (test) user as with my own personal login.
>>>> However, logging in as root gives a perfectly normal Gnome
>>>> screen.So it may be that somehow a permission got changed.
>>>> What's odd is that this all happened in the course of moving
>>>> the cursor around and the abrt error message suggests it was
>>>> moving the cursor across the clock that caused the problem.
>>>
>>> Gnome is *not the friend of getting work done*. Seriously. It's become
>>> so driven that it interferes with actual work.
>>
>> That's your experience.
>>
>> My experience with GNOME 3 on SL7.2 is that is vastly have improved
>> workflow.  A lot of it comes through very handy keyboard shortcuts and a
>> handful of GNOME Shell extensions.  In fact I can't imagine any sane
>> reason to move back to GNOME 2 or anything else - it just feels so
>> clumsy and horrid to work with for me.  Everything just runs very
>> smoothly and fine on my ThinkPad T450s.
>>
>> But this is /my/ experience.
>>
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> kind regards,
>>
>> David Sommerseth
>>
>>
>>   - If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have
>>     said "faster horses." -Henry Ford
>>