Thanks to MGSE, GNOME 3 finally looks a bit more "power user friendly". At the very least, there is no more stupid assumption that one app is one window! But ev

Thanks to MGSE, GNOME 3 finally looks a bit more "power user friendly". At the very least, there is no more stupid assumption that one app is one window! But even with MGSE, Mint 12's desktop environment is much less configurable than Mint 11. If you happen to like the default look, that's fine; but if you don't, there's not much you can do about it. I guess it will change as the developers put in more config options, though. Mint has always been on the side of people who like to tweak. MATE, on the other hand, was a bit disappointing in the RC. I haven't updated to the latest (pre-)release yet, but it felt rather unstable even with some of the interim updates. It's a pity because MATE is what many of the "heavy tweakers" will want to use for the time being. It's also not clear how long MATE will be maintained, if at all. Kudos to the team for trying to keep GNOME 2 alive, but I suspect it's going to be a long twilight in MATE land. I'll keep checking out Mint 12 from time to time, but for the time being I'll stick with Mint 10/11 and Xubuntu for day-to-day computing. Xfce 4.8 is conservative, lightweight, rock solid, and surprisingly configurable. It's not at all difficult to make it look almost exactly like Mint 10/11. I can see why Linus Torvalds publicly announced that he'd switch to Xfce: it's currently the best "old-style" desktop environment out there. I wonder why the Mint team didn't consider Xfce for an almost drop-in GNOME 2 replacement. Oh wait, they already have a Debian Edition with Xfce.