Ah, I guess my reference point was old. There the discrepancy lay. I hadn't tried Gnome since 3.1(?) (early 2014? does that sound right?) at which point it wasn

Ah, I guess my reference point was old. There the discrepancy lay. I hadn't tried Gnome since 3.1(?) (early 2014? does that sound right?) at which point it wasn't nearly as clean as your DE (which is super pretty, I'll readily admit). I think we're really on the same page for the most part. How much tweaking went into that? Do you have a write-up with what sort of steps you took to integrate that sort of functionality (added fonts/behavioral changes/dbus integration type components, etc)? I'm with you on the "beating OS X" threshold re: UI. Between the whole Atom/Electron/LightTable type WebKit environments, you can develop on any machine. Likewise IntelliJ(Cursive for Clojure), emacs and vim all work as well if not better on Linux. Unless you are tied into Xcode, the development experience for an engineer is finally desktop-ready as the (very challenging) OSX-interface parity threshold has been broken.