My current preferred DE is GNOME 3. It gets a lot of hate right now, but its a really stress-free environment for me. Taking a look at the GNOME 3 cheat-sheet

My current preferred DE is GNOME 3. It gets a lot of hate right now, but its a really stress-free environment for me. Taking a look at the GNOME 3 cheat-sheet will fix most of the power-user complaints. I think when GNOME 3 get more features and applications it will quickly regain user share because of its superior design philosophy. Like what happened to GNOME 2 - it got flamed hard in the reviews, Linus blasted it; but its developers kept making it better without changing their design decisions and it was adopted by major distributions and most users stuck with it.