We love GNOME. Sometime around 2.6 it started becoming really, really damned good, and a lot faster and more responsive. All kinds of nice things like Network Manager, the Nautilus CD burner and the SFTP support popped up. It helps that most major Linux apps like like Firefox, Evolution, GAIM, and OpenOffice use the same toolkit and themes too. Obviously we’re not alone either: Ubuntu, RHEL and SuSE all use GNOME by default.
Here’s a bunch of ideas to improve it.