Fedora 17 will have a Gnome 3 desktop that will support software rendering as well as keeping support for 3D hardware, this will enable use of the new Gnome interface on older machines that do not include support for hardware rendered interfaces, which the current build of Gnome 3 certainly is. BTRFS will be the default file-system for a default installation, which is a change from the older EXT4 file-system that Fedora 15 and 16 have used. I still use EXT4, and it is fast and reliable. The Gnome 3 desktop has won a Linux Journal Readers Choice award for 2011, this even after all the hate that the new Gnome version is getting from users. With the simple mechanism of JavaScript to create extensions for the desktop, it should not be very hard to create a Gnome 3 interface that is resembling the Gnome 2.32 desktop that Ubuntu famously used before 11.04. The Gnome 3 desktop is extensible unlike the horrible Unity interface that Ubuntu users have to suffer with in the name of “progress”. Putting the title buttons on the left side of the window, with the close button right above the file menu is one annoyance from Canonical, but then they gave us Unity, the desktop equivalent of Kazakhstan Donkey feces.
If you replace the Unity desktop with the Compiz powered Gnome 3 desktop, then your sanity will be preserved. There must be a few fans of this desktop if they were not trolling the poll just for the laughs. KDE is very bloated as well, the Windows 7 desktop is faster and sleeker than the KDE 4.x desktop. Sure the KDE desktop is quite a large desktop environment to install, but even the K menu is seriously bloated, the desktop after loading with 2GiB of RAM can take up to a minute to start playing the login sound before you can even access the K menu. The layout of the Windows 7 start menu makes more sense and it is far faster to navigate. If you right-click on the K menu icon and select Classic Menu Style, then the menu is slightly more bearable. I am not the only one who thinks that the Linux desktop is getting bloated and out of control. I have setup a desktop with Fluxbox and Tint2 to use when the more memory hungry desktop environments like Gnome 3 and KDE become annoying. Hopefully soon the KDE team can cut the bloat in their desktop and make it as fast as the KDE 3.4 release was. If KDE could be as fast as the Windows 2000 and NT 4.0 desktops were, then it would be well worth using as your Linux desktop.
Page looks a little better now with some CSS hacking. Still enjoying my Gnome 3 desktop.