There is a fork of GNOME Shell you might want to look at called Cinnamon. I'm
not terribly familiar with it although I know one of the projects we are
sponsoring has a heavy hand in its development. Unlike Mate it is based on
GNOME 3 components. That might be a more sound direction to go in due to the
financial and development resources being poured into it. Unlike MATE I don't
think GNOME 3 is quite dead yet. For one not everybody hates it and two it
has Red Hat behind it. Of course that is apparently part of the problem.
Apparently Red Hat's involvement has/is heavily influencing the direction of
the GNOME desktop environment.
I'll back up a minute too. I'm not saying MATE is dead. I'm just not sure if
there is the developer base to maintain or improve it. Red Hat and Canonical
though have a huge pool of money to fund the development of GNOME 3/Unity and
comparison wise I'd be doubtful that MATE or Cinnamon can survive without
piggybacking off a larger project.
XFCE and some others do exist as people have mentioned. As far as I know
these other desktop environments don't have anywhere near the resources so it
might be short sighted to say any of them will be dead tomorrow so long as
there are a few dedicated individuals.
It seems to me the projects going places are the more community oriented ones
with less corporate direction. Unity is Canonical, whereas GNOME is Red Hat.
There may be a difference between GNOME 3 and Unity development wise although
I think the money/development behind each says a lot.
Cinnamon and MATE are more community oriented.
:) If I got anything wrong here please feel free to correct.
