[tsahyt]

From what I've seen, mate (the Gnome 2 fork) looks decent too. After the disaster that was Gnome 3 I've went away from full DEs to a simple but great tiling window manager (awesome, that's the name of it as well as the description). Since 99% of my use cases really involve just a terminal or firefox that's probably as good as it gets for me :) No bloat, just great usability without ever needing the mouse - which is especially great on a laptop since touchpads have always been suboptimal pointing devices.

[rwmj]

Although I don't use it day to day, I was rather impressed by Cinnamon (on Mint). It's got the GNOME 3 visual wizziness, without all the usability problems that GNOME 3 suffers from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon_%28user_interface%29

[sandGorgon]

The Cinnamon desktop is a Kickstarter worthy effort. I believe it supersedes Linux Mint in its possible impact, because it is potentially usable on any Linux flavor.

[bmasci]

Cinnamon is great. I'm actually using a gnome classic DE right now, but i suspect that I'll switch to cinnamon when it becomes more polished.