We all knew this was coming*, after the GNOME-Shell failasco *cough*.
GNOME has been forked! Well, the old GNOME, to be precise. Or to be even more accurate for the sake of being correct – if redundant – the panel, metacity, and a few other components – have been forked into *no drumroll please*:
Yes, the name… um… sucks (is it ex- desktop environment? As in ex-girlfriend DE?). At least the roadmap is pretty (as pretty as walls of text can be!), and looks promising. Personally, my feelings are mixed. I don’t like GNOME Shell, but I’m not going to get my hopes up just yet, until this thing gets a bit more traction 
.
On the flip side – GNOME 3 is due to be released (soon) – which will bring a boat load of gold, silver, and bananas to the desktop environment, such as a cairo-based GTK3.x, new widgets (woot), and, you guessed it, the new shell.
Some extra thoughts:
Wonder what will be forked next? BSD? It could use a new pitchfork wielding mascot – just for the uselessness of it (the forking). Personally all this forking in FOSS seems to me a good thing, since most of the forks are leading to results (LibreOffice for example), but it seems a bit too much like monkey see monkey attempt to do and not exactly – do (ffmpeg).
*(we did?)
Comments on: "GNOME HAS BEEN FORKED! OH… MY… -_- duh…" (2)
I wish the EXDE guys luck and success but I don’t like their attitude at all.
They way I read their project vision I sounds very stuck-up.
Of course people will have to adapt to change and of course that might not be comfortable at first but if you are not open for change you will end up as some kind of fossil. It is the typical “oh-no-this-is-new-so-it-is-bad”-thinking. With such a thinking innovation is not possible and you stand still.
So true. GNOME 2.x was well design, but it’s gotten old. At times like this it’s always best to rip it up and start over. Sadly GNOME Shell didn’t really take a wise approach, and some argue the same about unity – but hopefully within another two releases on either side we will see some results along the lines of the success had by KDE 4.x.
As for EXDE (EXalted DEsktop – according to the FAQ) – *feels uneasy, takes a trip to the bathroom* – the attitude potrayed behind the the project really taints their ideas like food poisoning.