The sad thing is that many people will not think they have much choice with
Win8, but will try to adjust to the mess, and with secure boot MS is making one
more obstacle in the path of linux.
Ubuntu has improved Unity, I'd say it's almost useful to me at this point. My
main issue is that it seems resource hungry, and 2D Unity may not be around
long. The best thing Ubuntu did with Unity was give the option to shrink the
launcher size. If they could get over having it stuck to the left, and would
allow it to be moved to the bottom--pretty much all the griping about it would
be over.
Mint is working on Cinnamon, and it is getting better all the time. Didn't
they say MATE is moving to gtk3?
I'll tell you who to watch, ikey over at SoluOS is turning Gnome 3 (he is
calling it classic I think) into a thing of beauty. The SolusOS 2 alpha 3 is
available and the menu looks impressive as well as the panel. It is hard to tell
the difference between Gnome 2.
KDE is now king in my book, with some tweaking runs as well as Xfce on my
machines. I think Mint is working their heart out when they should just move
Mint KDE up as their default distro, Mint 12 KDE was awesome, Mint 13 KDE should
be even better. They are hooked up with the netrunner folks now and I would
think KDE is, or soon will be, their most polished distro.