I have road driven Gnome 3, and in the most part it buys me nothing. Unity gives me the creeps. So I run a normal windows and taskbar desktop (bit like win 95), but I must say it's still pretty sucky. Partly because of inconsistencies across the platform.

Applications end up doing their own file management for example.

There are alternative innovative ways to access menus and trigger actions. Context tasks etc. But people are stuck in the past it's like they can't imagine anything different.

Linux also has inconsistencies between windowing tool-kits.

Mobile gets a little more attention these days. But that seems to also be stuck in a rut.

I meant experimental forks. Ubuntu foisting unity upon people was pretty damaging. Again if only they'd concentrated on the last 10%. Instead of creating a mess.

With age some tasks have become harder for me. I used to be quite a whizz at dragging and dropping, and fine pointer precision. Now I'm a bit of a fat handed twat, and my eyes aren't that great. I really do need a 10ft display with simple controls.

A lot of this is stuff is usability and ergonomics 101.