Gnome 3 - This is the end, it seems

For people who want a classical and snappy desktop that's still rather pretty, there's always http://xfce.org/ and http://xubuntu.com

Both the Gnome 3 and Unity teams seem to have completely lost the plot with regard to who their target user base is. Virtually everyone who uses a Linux desktop is a power user, after all.

Desktop computing should not be drawing so much inspiration from tablet computing. They are different use-cases, and no desktop OS is going to break into the tablet market. He talks of the safe conservatism of Windows but sadly that is headed in the same direction. But no one who uses Metro is going to use it in the way Microsoft has in mind, which is apparently either with their elbows propped up on their desk interacting with a touchscreen monitor, or on a tablet device whose manufacturer installed Windows 8 by mistake instead of iOS or Android or whatever the equivalent for Windows Phone OS will be. Windows is a mouse-and-keyboard desktop environment, as are Unity and Gnome 3, and they will remain so for as long as we have PCs sitting under desks connected to monitors sitting above desks. The use case of desktop computing used to be split between "I have shit to do" and "I'm bored and don't have shit to do" but the latter is moving quite quickly to tablets. If a desktop abandons the former to try to scoop up the latter they will lose both.