It seems Mark Shuttleworth's strategy for Canonical is expand on support, and sunset projects to decrease costs. So far: Mir, Unity, Ubuntu mobile, etc. Now, m

It seems Mark Shuttleworth's strategy for Canonical is expand on support, and sunset projects to decrease costs. So far: Mir, Unity, Ubuntu mobile, etc. Now, many people suggest to go directly to Gnome, but in reality you have many more aditional desktop manager choices on Ubuntu (tried to limit the list to the ones in active development): - GTK based: Gnome, Pantheon, Budgie, Cinnamon, MATE (Gnome 2 fork), XFCE - Qt based: KDE, Trinity (KDE 3 fork), LXQt - NeXT inspired: GNUStep, Window Maker - Others: Enlightment, CDE. They all have their tradeoffs. If you are used to the MS Windows look and feel, maybe Cinnamon/LXQt/Trinity will be the closest. If you are used to the macOS look and feel, maybe Pantheon or MATE may be closer. I personally prefer and use Gnome. The Gnome 3 shell is different from everything else (Gnome 2 included), but it was designed trying to minimize distractions. With some tuning (http://extensions.gnome.org http://extensions.gnome.org) you can adapt it to your needs. KDE is fine, but most applications I use are GTK based, so I picked a GTK desktop environment. XFCE is great and performant but hasn't received many updates lately. Development is still active though (https://blog.xfce.org/ https://blog.xfce.org/).