[Lemur]

These are my opinions from experimentation.

Through the last few months we've seen the emergence of various new takes on how the desktop should operate, how it should look, and even down to the target markets. I can't say I'm a fan of what's been done so far, but a quick write up on what I have experimented on:

Unity



Designed to be used primarily with touchscreens and the coming tablet market by Ubuntu, this GUI made its infamous debut in the 11.x releases.

Noticeable differences from gnome 2 are the integration of the windows manipulation and title bars into a global top bar. Icons and launchers are moved to the side, which disappear until moused over.

While this is brilliant for a touch screen interface, I found it driving me absolutely mad on a desktop machine, involving far too much dynamic menus, rearrangement, and space between items.

Gnome 3



Not far behind was Gnome 3, making its appearance in the 11.1 release of Ubuntu, and the 15 release of Fedora. Like Unity, it involves far heavier focus on the top menu.

Annoyances that I've observed up to this point are difficulty to quickly open multiple instances of a window on default, multiple clicks to even get into the menus, lack of minimize and maximize buttons on default, and the presence of a quick launcher that effectively masks other applications behind another few clicks.

(Granted it is more tolerable than Unity.)

Cinnamon



If there's one GUI that's gotten my attention, it's cinnamon. No extras on the menu, straightforward, and retains the classic gnome2 feel. While it's still young, reaching version 1.x only a few weeks ago, it shows some serious promise in restoring sanity to the desktop environment instead of trying to reinvent everything.

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I'll experiment more with OpenBox and Enlightenment as I get some time. More on my list to test are XFCE, KDE4, and anything else recommended.

So what are your opinions of the new crop of GUIs surfacing?

[wordswords]

I didn't really like Unity. I like Gnome 3, which I am using on my main install now. I haven't tried Cinnnamon but it doesn't really appeal from the screenshot. I'm sufficiently happy with G3 not to want to try others.

One thing that does annoy me about G3 is that it's quite easy to accidently trigger the top right corner action when you're clicking around in Chrome. But really that is my only complaint. Everything else it does, it does very well for me.

[xclite]

I always liked the default OpenBox setup that came with Crunchbang - enough that I usually don't even mess with it:

[Lemur]

The heavier I get into *nix systems the more that I find myself scaling back the GUI because it just gets in the way and I hate moving my hand to a mouse unless I absolutely have to.