I took the same approach initially, and I'm also using xfce now. That being said, a lot of the programs I use fall under the GNOME umbrella at some level, and I

I took the same approach initially, and I'm also using xfce now. That being said, a lot of the programs I use fall under the GNOME umbrella at some level, and I'm slowly starting to see more "new GNOME" leak into my desktop than I would like. I'm specifically referring to the style, arrangement, and (lack of) configurability in the upper region of the window. Here's an example of an archive manager today (xfce on debian unstable): http://ugcs.caltech.edu/~ohazi/misc/file-roller-gnome.png http://ugcs.caltech.edu/~ohazi/misc/file-roller-gnome.png What it used to look like: http://repo.openpandora.org/files/pnd/fileroller/previews/fileroller.png http://repo.openpandora.org/files/pnd/fileroller/previews/fi... This is slowly happening with a lot of applications that I use regularly. > What is it that GNOME devs do that is so valuable and unique? In my opinion the biggest problem is that they still control mainline GTK. Many of the high quality Linux desktop apps "automatically" fall under the GNOME umbrella because of this, and it's going to take a lot more than just switching to xfce to get them back out. It's become pretty clear to me that GNOME is trying to become a mobile first platform, and that they'd like to take many of my desktop applications with them. I'm not really sure what a good long term solution to this problem is.