Linux should be like a window
George Orwell wrote "Good prose is like a window pane". Good software is the same, so that you are concentrating on what you are doing, not how you are doing it.
christiania, glass house, august 2007 By seier+seier on Flickr
In the nascent surge of mobile convergence, we now have a choice of four major desktops for Linux: GNOME 3, Ubuntu Unity, KDE 4 and Linux Mint's Cinnamon. There are huge, complex and mind-numbingly technical advances in all of this technology. But all I want is for my window still to work the way I want.
This is why I have made the switch to Linux Mint, because it is customisable and works more like how Ubuntu used to. Now whether legacy dinosaurs will have their fossilised remains swept asunder by the massed and youthful mobile hordes of New Gen Linux Users remains to be seen. It's a long game. But in the short term, I would wager that Linux Mint has taken a sizeable chunk of Ubuntu users.
In my set ways, I like and use the desktop on a regular basis. I save stuff there that I need to work on immediately, and then bin it or file it later.
I like my desktop
I also use a keystroke launcher, it used to be GNOME Do but now I use GNOME 3's built-in Activities window launcher.
GNOME 3 Activities screen and keystroke launcher
Of course, this choice of desktop options (which extends even further with XFCE, LXDE, Enlightenment et al) is what is so fantastic about Linux and Free Software. It's interesting that a McWindow's monolithic lack of choice is somehow heralded as favourable: we need windows that fit the user, not vice versa.