I’d rather switch to Windows again than use Gnome 3 or Unity, and I was seriously considering it, but now that I’ve discovered Xubuntu I’m feeling right at home.

Gnome is evolving in a direction likely to alienate many Gnome users in the near future. In particular Gnome is about to make itself incompatible with Compiz. The Gnome developers (in their insufferable arrogance) think they can do 3-D better and have written their own integrated window manager ‘muddle’ to run the new gnome-panel. Consequently you won’t be able to run compiz with gnome. Early previews look clunky extremely boring and surprisingly ugly.

Now your opinions may vary. Maybe you are going to think the new gnome-panel is the coolest thing ever. But I suspect there will be heaps of people like myself who are going to look at it and go … blech! OK – I know the new gnome-panel is only alpha. But I have absolutely no confidence that the release version will be any better because the approach is just all wrong. There is no understanding at all about what people find cool currently about Compiz. Compiz is all about ultimate configurability, fun and extreme over the top graphic effects. The Gnome people obsess about a consistent user experience (it is going to be mostly inconfigurable you can bet) and expect us to jump up and down and wet ourselves in excitement when a window minimises smoothly to the task area. No cube. No wobbly windows. No goldfish. And deprecating comments about “bling” on the part of the gnome developers indicate such things are likely to be regarded as frivolous and extremely low priority.

So in about a year there will be a lot of seriously pissed off Compiz loving Gnome refugees running around the place who will find the similarities between xfce and gnome (and the fact that it plays nice with Compiz) may make it exactly what they are looking for.

Would be best to have a great stripped down, functional and speedy desktop you can build your own with – Ubuntu from Scratch starting with xfce of course.

If the direction that xubuntu is going is more gnome-ish, well count me out.

Using GTK applications as much as possible makes sense, given that is the toolkit of the DE.

I hope they figure out their identity, and fast. This should have been figured out when the project started, not three releases into it, or however many it has been.