Comment 22 for bug 406438

I'm quite surprised that this change has been suggested as an enhancement, without much inspiration in the form of pain (in terms of usability, technical problems or otherwise).

The date in the clock applet has long been regarded as one of those tiny little "nice touches" which make people feel happy about their GNOME desktop. Back when I was regularly travelling and evangelising GNOME and Ubuntu, it was often raised -- unprompted -- by folks seeing the desktop for the first time as useful, handy, cute, a good thought, "ooh, Windows doesn't do that for you!", etc.

This is the kind of non-bug which is very easy to have an argument about, but can only be properly considered in the context of a more holistic "redesign the (default) shell interface" discussion. Given that there's little demonstrable *pain* involved in this "papercut", I'd suggest leaving it as-is -- particularly given the massive changes coming down the pipeline with the new GNOME Shell.

After all, never-ending small churn is incredibly painful to real users. :-)