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> When Gnome2 was finally removed from Ubuntu, I tried Unity desktop for a while, didn't like it and installed Gnome3...

Gnome 3 was never known as an improvement over Gnome 2. But didn't Gnome 2 continue as MATE? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATE_(software)

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It was picked up by an interested party and then attracted a community, after the Gnome folks dropped Gnome 2 like a hot coal when they announced Gnome 3 (no we're not supporting it any more, it's deprecated, no, there's no way to make 3 behave like 2, no, you can't have 2 and 3 on the same box, that doesn't work).

So it continued after a short period of discontinuity, during which time I think a lot of people moved to Xfce, and Mint built their "Cinnamon" DE.

There was a several year hiatus between end of gnome 2 and beginning of mate, and even longer (a year or two) before mate was solid. During this time I remember a lot of attempts at gnome 2 replacement (fallback, flashback etc) and people jumping ship to xfce. I spent a while on ubuntu 10.04 LTS beyond security support then crunchbang before hearing of the mate project, then moved to linux mint and ubuntumate, which is where I've stayed. Those years were a bit disrupted and I stopped recommending linux to friends during that time.

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