[jiggy2011]

"Streamlined" and "lighter weight" are subjective phrases. I think the Gnome team are building what they would consider a streamlined interface, just their idea of what that is differs from some.

System resources are not much of an issue anymore, the amount of memory most window managers require compared with other applications is fairly negligible even with "heavyweight" Window managers. Unity+Nautilus together are using ~400MB/8GB on my Ubuntu 12.04 PC.

The hardcore "lightweight" WM fans only need a way to tile their terminal and XMonad already provides that.

With Ubuntu 12.04 every digital camera I've tried has just worked. I plug it in and and offers to import all of the photos for me straight away, no need for instructions or drivers.

Getting professional software would require either persuading enough of the big names in the business like Adobe , Steinberg , Avid etc to port their stuff to the platform or it would require Gnome contributors to create full equivalents for all of these programs from scratch with their already stretched resources so very impractical.

Creating an iPhoto type front end for GIMP seems a more achievable goal.

[dkhenry]

That ~400M of ram comes with other penalities then just thw space it takes up. This is the problem firefox got into. they just kept getting bigger continually saying ram is cheap and desktops have tons of ram. Just because I have 8Gb of ram doesn't mean I want my WM taking up all of it. What do I get for all that ram anyway. I get to have my desktop composed using javascript. This is why people left for XFCE this isn't a small subset of XMonad users, there are actually lots of people in between who want a windowed desktop, but don't want a huge heavy enviroment. GNOME can be that desktop.

[jiggy2011]

I guess I wouldn't consider Gnome a "heavy" desktop, at least not any heavier than Windows 7 or Mac OS desktops.

I don't think ~400MB for a window manager on a dekstop is a big deal in 2012 and being able to compose your desktop using javascript is a breath of fresh air vs using old arcane APIs. When you have as much excess horsepower as you do in a modern PC (for most tasks) it seems wasteful not to use some of it to make your life easier.