One reason why I'm using XFCE now is the fact that the other DE's have screwed up. I had high expectations for Gnome Shell and I knew that it wasn't going to be an easy road regarding it's change considering the KDE konundrum a couple of years prior. But, Gnomes Hell is really one unholy mess as a desktop enviroment and appears, at least to me, to be going round in circles. As Linus points out, the tools to modify and personalise Gnome Shell are poor and the user has to rely on extensions that tend to break with each point update.
KDE went from being pretty usable and snappy in it's 3.5 days to becoming a bloated and buggy hog - granted it's got better but it still is a bit buggy and bloated for me personally.
Ubuntu, well it will be interesting to see what its corporate customers think of 12.04 LTS. They seem to have alienated a fair proportion of their user base with Unity - I stopped at 10.10. Even though I have tried each release since, it's never lasted more than a few days.
With Cinnamon and MATE, I realise why these were "born" but it just adds to the diversity and fragmentation of Linux in general. Why not get behind XFCE and make it the "Gnome Successor" it was intended to be - lets have a traditional desktop leading the pack
Lets stop wasting time reinventing the wheel and put the energy into making it rock solid and reliable.
