Of course it's not by chance that Oracle has selected (to keep) GNOME desktop (version 2.30.2) as the default Solaris desktop since the very first incarnation of Solaris 11 that followed OpenSolaris.
It's stable enough and has many resources that most of us will ever need and I say not even system administrators and alike. This can be perceived in many ways and even if you change worlds to take a quick ride on what happens in terms of graphical user interface since Windows NT 4.0 onwards. On the Windows side on can see how kind of crazy things turned out as Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 had already most that anyone would ever really need from a desktop. Of course, there are many small improvements and niceties. But all that crap, heavy and complex stuff that on can nowadays find since Windows Vista is too distracting and mostly useless. And I prefer to say nothing about Windows 8 and Windows 10.
It's true that GNOME 3 series also seems to have lost its path giving it away to all this "modern" desktop hype that is always trying to find a new and surprising way to do the same things.
But as I mentioned above GNOME 2 series still exhibits a good enough balance amongst stability, simplicity and features. Together with the associated but yet decoupled Window system model of the X subsystem it provides a really cool desktop experience that's still better than any Windows incarnation, except by very few detail which more than compensates for the lack of flexibility on Windows.
It's more and more clear that Windows is turning into a useless toy after the great expectations and hopes it gathered with Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 releases. It's shocking to note that what was once great (it's graphical user interface) is turning against itself and misleading its quality and evolution on the last decade. Sorry, no offense, on the contrary.
By contrast, the UNIX world, the GNU software, the X system on nVidia desktop cards, the many desktop systems (in particular GNOME 2), that Compiz plug-in (and many other great ones), have proved their value and endurance across many more years, which counts a lot because no one that needs to run something on a long term basis are willing to go through a storm of bells and whistles just for the sake of not being bored with something well established that works flawless and without a lot of security holes exposures and clumsy and tedious time-consuming monthly patching and so on...
I have collected a few topics that matters to me on the GNOME Desktop.
I would hope it would be useful to you as well.
