rajm,
Thanks for the heads up--I hadn't even noticed the new version.
0.9.28 works much better than 0.9.27, to the extent that I think it's now reasonable to use it seriously. The 3d Preview is now in the correct place, and the node overview doesn't expand to take up the whole screen whenever you mouse over it. Instead of uniform gray, the rest of the UI now shows random noise--but the UI seems to be slightly better at sticking around after mouseovers and other events than it used to be.. In addition, now that the node overview works well, you can edit node properties by double-clicking on that node--the window that pops up shows up fine, perfect other than not displaying button icons, which are uniformly unimportant here. This was you can avoid using the left panel entirely, though you'll have to get used to how the node interface works.
I tried a simple test render, and it worked fine--though it took 8:59 as opposed to 7:25 under Windows XP Home (I dual boot), a hit of about 20%. I don't know if that is overhead due to WINE, or due to other processes running--it wasn't a scientific benchmark.
It would still be nice to get the left UI panel working, of course.
[On a side note: I downloaded the Crossover Office 6.0 beta, and in addition to not running TG any better than WINE 0.9.27, it doesn't close properly--it uses 99% of the processor after you quit, so that you have to kill the process manually.]
