I've used Gnome Shell on the last two releases of Fedora. I've grown to be comfortable with it but the idea of having to rely on multiple(9 in my case) extensions to get to that state is too much. Couple that with having to worry if extensions will be updated to work with each new release of Gnome. I had been interested in Cinnamon but was under the impression it was the distinguishing feature of Linux Mint. Cinnamon is now available for several distributions including Fedora(yum install cinnamon). For me, Cinnamon is what Gnome Shell should have been and I have no problem recommending it.
I still have a bad feeling about how the Mint team have been actively forking every GTK3 project Gnome has. Especially when they forked Nautilus into Nemo, I really feel like they should have gone with Thunar or Marlin. Maybe they should have also opted to try unifying under XFCE and fixing gtk3 to work with it instead of just forking Gnome Shell.
I dunno, I just feel like the direction of "fork everything even when alternatives with our same mindset exist" seem like a waste of effort.
The alternativees aren't GNOME, and many liked GNOME until very recently. (Well, it's been a year or 1.5 now, I guess, from the end-user perspective. Longer in development, I guess.)
It seems like Mint is trying to execute a hostile takeover of GNOME. Of course, GNOME is free software and forkable, and branches aren't necessarily subservient to the lines they branch from, so "takeover" means "establish a reputation as the highest-quality fork"
If the majority of the community begins to respect and support Mint as a better GNOME than the current stewards of GNOME, and Mint "rescues" the good majority of the GNOME software, we can jettison the old GNOME management, welcome the migration of contributors from old GNOME, and carry on.
The switchover is a huge mess of confusion, though.
XFCE is kind of gnome. Built off gtk2 and all. It was never mainline super integrated gnome, and it replaced a lot of dumb shit you didn't need to rewrite (see: the fudging calculator, the terminal emulator, etc) but I still feel like Cinnamon / XFCE should be in the same camp. They want the same thing, after all.
