I think it _has_ been better. Unity has brought a lot of innovations, and it would have been a lot better to keep it around. Gnome devs started making extreme

I think it _has_ been better. Unity has brought a lot of innovations, and it would have been a lot better to keep it around. Gnome devs started making extremely unpopular changes that are hard or impossible to revert. Unity at least put some pressure on them to consider their users a little bit. If only for this reason, Unity's existence was a good thing even if you didn't like or didnt' use Unity. The situation to me is similar to Chrome's dominance, with Firefox being around to be used by few people, but having the very important role of not leaving everything to one company/group/project. I've tried using Gnome 3 but there are just a few things that drive me (and lots of other people) crazy and can't be changed. Along with the project's "our way or the highway" attitude that made me switch to Xfce. If Ubuntu keeps being based on Gnome, Gnome might keep leaking some of their great ideas to Ubuntu, which is bad IMHO. Xfce is a little too barebone but very usable, and with an extremely positive community. Devs are normal human beings that never look down on you (from my experience)--which can't be said of all open source projects.