I don't want to claim the expert title either.. :) Regarding the specific questions: I doubt that it would be good if Canonical would actually fork Gnome (or

I don't want to claim the expert title either.. :) Regarding the specific questions: I doubt that it would be good if Canonical would actually fork Gnome (or the drop the brand). Leave aside my attachment to the brand as it is: Canonical has done a lot of good things for this platform in the past. I think it would be detrimental so the adoption of Gnome to send them away (or let them leave). A middle ground of some sorts needs to be found. How would those users think Gnome is crap if nothing is labeled as Gnome: Here I was referring to the Gnome ecosystem. If they patch GEdit to do X but it crashes now on every 10th launch, the application is getting the blame. You are right: I'm not sure if the connection between blaming application X and losing faith in the desktop project isn't overly pessimistic, now that I think about it again.