[DanBC]

Some people get used to a workflow. They have an environment set up just how they like.

All of a sudden Gnome release Gnome 3 - which breaks a lot of that workflow, and also means that people wanting to stay at Gnome 2.x are going to drift slowly into dependancy hell. And Shuttleworth plays his benign dictator card, saying he doesn't care what the community thinks, they're wrong, and Unity is the way forward. Unity also breaks the workflow.

Now those users are kind of stuck. KDE also has an example of dramatic change, so people might be reluctant to move there.

LXDE or XFCE aren't yet mature and there are some frustrating features with both. (But they've picked up some users.)

And then you're left with self-built desktop environments - one of the *boxes or some other WM + file manager + etc etc.

[Tudisco]

XFCE is great. I switched to xubuntu and loving it. It might be lacking. but I find it far more enjoyable to use than Unity or gnome3. I tried to use both gnome3 and unity. and both had me very frustrated.

[DanBC]

Sure - re-reading my comment I see I was perhaps a bit dismissive but that wasn't my intention.