OS and Software > All Things Unix > Is GNOME in Free Fall?

...GNOME 3 would not only lag behind KDE for code maturity and innovation, but fail catastrophically with users, resulting in alternative interfaces, ranging from Ubuntu's Unity to Linux Mint's re-creations of GNOME 2 in Cinnamon and Mate.

The collapse is so thorough that GNOME is reportedly now talking about obtaining a twenty percent share of the Linux desktop by 2020, where a few years ago its share was well over forty percent.

I know of no figures for traditional desktop usage in 2012, but LinuxQuestion's 2011 survey showed KDE in front, followed by Xfce. Cinnamon was too new to make the survey at all, and Mate registered only a few percent, but, like Unity, both are almost certain to do better this year.

Some, or even all three of these desktops are likely to do better than the 19% that GNOME 3 managed in 2011. GNOME 3 itself will probably show even further decline. As for actual numbers of users, all traditional desktops are likely to lose ground to mobile devices.

Today, the Cold War of the giants, of KDE vs. GNOME, is over. We are in a new era of diversity (or fragmentation, if you think having more choices is a bad thing). So which, if any desktops are likely to dominate in the next few years?

Which will be the source of major innovations? Which will fail to emerge from the pack? Which are likely to be in the running?

None of these questions are as easy to answer as they were three years ago.

Who's gonna dominate? Pretty obvious. Spacecoke Mark has his army of Kool Aid Kids, almost as bad as the fruit fanbois. He really worked on building a cult

Why is it necessary to be insulting every time you talk about Ubuntu? Is it out of the realm of possibility that Mark is doing something that others genuinely appreciate and perhaps that's a good thing?