Sure, it's still installed all over the place (just like Windows 98 and XP might be), but it is by all means a dead project.
Unity (and this fork, as I understand it) are based on Gnome (3!) and just replace the shell. So your list becomes
- Gnome (Gnome-Shell, Unity, this fork)
- KDE
- (list of minorities)
For me - while being a Gnome guy and preferring the gnome-shell option from that list - the choice doesn't really matter. It's as moot as arguments during the times of Windows XP were, about whether you should enable the classic mode or use the Luna theme.
1) think the differences between those shells are much bigger than between Luna and classic in XP
2) that it's a different shell, not a fully different desktop environment isn't really that important, for a normal user it will already cause confusion (maybe even more as it requires additional explanation what's the difference between the two).
Don't get me wrong: the thing that you have a choice is one of the virtues of Linux, but at the same time what it causes is that:
a) Linux is doomed to fail on a mainstream desktop market
b) none of the available choices is and probably will never be as polished as commercial competitors (and fragmentation is one of the reasons of that)
1) ~Maybe~. In absolutes, I agree. I don't think it matters much though.
2) Sticking with Windows comparisons: Moving from 98 to XP was different in quite some ways, to Vista and beyond was another change in lots of things.
We agree that choice is good. We disagree about whether there's too much choice right now. I see only two technical choices, KDE or Gnome, with the Gnome-Shell/Unity variants for the latter. No idea if this fork will prevail and be part of the list in the future.
The average user, the "grandma" that often comes up during these discussions, doesn't care. My gut feeling says that she'll end up with Ubuntu or Kubuntu installed (Maybe Mint. Maybe Fedora) and use what is available.
And quite frankly, what _is_ available is ready for every casual/average home user, in my opinion.
Agreed. If "grandma" were to choose Ubuntu, she would have a good quality 140 page manual ready to download and dip into. See the Ubuntu-Manual project on launchpad for the Unity version (currently at alpha).
Most office workers spend very little time interacting with the desktop. They'll have some office suite open, or they'll have their niche piece of software, or they'll be using some manufacturing / accounts (I'm trying to describe things like Sage Line 50, Line 100, etc) open.
The barrier to Linux on the desktop in that situation is not the desktop being used, but the main bit of software being used.
Provide Line 100 in Linux, or EMIS (Egton Medical Information Systems or similar) on Linux with some decent support system and you'd get a lot of uptake.
Remember that small offices (under 20 people) often have no IT department, they have the guy who knows about computers and a support contract. Other people won't know how to CC or BCC, or how to sort a column of numbers in a spreadsheet. See also Google showing that the vast majority of people were using the + operator incorrectly.
In what context did people Google find that people were using + incorrectly? That would make sense in the search bar, because they changed it recently.
Linux is a kernel. Your question could be rephrased as "We have Gnome 2, 3, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Unity, Cinnamon, Android, WebOS, ChromeOS. Has any of these any chance on the desktop market?" and become meaningful.
Right now, I don't even think PCs as we know them - where we manage locally stored data and applications rather than the curated experiences popularized by Apple - will be a meaningful chunk of the market.
Sure, it's still installed all over the place (just like Windows 98 and XP might be), but it is by all means a dead project.
Unity (and this fork, as I understand it) are based on Gnome (3!) and just replace the shell. So your list becomes
- Gnome (Gnome-Shell, Unity, this fork)
- KDE
- (list of minorities)
For me - while being a Gnome guy and preferring the gnome-shell option from that list - the choice doesn't really matter. It's as moot as arguments during the times of Windows XP were, about whether you should enable the classic mode or use the Luna theme.