Andy Hertzfeld one of the original Mac hackers was once working for a company called Eazel, that worked on GNOME before it went bust. They folded up in 2001 iirc - I bought their T-shirt to help them out. But after ten years of the GNOME UI, I don't have high hopes. Check out John Gruber's post titled Ronco spray-on usability that's very critical of open source attitude towards designing UIs.

Andy was not very impressed with GNOME: http://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2005/10/andy-hertzfeld-on-gnom...

The problem with GNOME is the programmers who think they are UI experts. At least with a web UI, you can be minimalist (like Google) and not expose your lack of design skills. But it's very difficult to do that on the desktop.

Mark Shuttleworth spatial Nautilus experiments don't inspire any confidence in his taste. Even before Ubuntu the Ximian stuff (that ended up in Novell's distro) was pretty polished.