Mailing the story:
GNOME - From abyss to common ground
Linus Torvalds has been saying rude things about GNOME, and Benjamin Otte has been staring into the abyss. GNOME 3 hasn't been the easy success the GNOME developers might have hoped for, and users are said to be leaving for Xfce, LXDE and Cinnamon, all of which replicate in some aspect or another the GNOME 2 user experience.