I have been running Gnome since 1998. In response to a need for a current version of Libreoffice, of all things, I finally "upgraded" to Gnome 3, and immediately switched over to Xfce. The result has not been entirely satisfactory. Loss of emacs edit key bindings turned out to be fixable with a cheesy bash command. I'm not yet certain that middle-button emulation will be as easy to restore -- I'll have to restart X to find out. The Gnome battery-condition indicator was better than Xfce's, and I miss Gnome 2's performance-graph panel applet. I'm half-tempted to give Gnome "fallback mode" a try, but then I remind myself Gnome can only get worse, while Xfce might actually get better. And who knows? I have yet to try Lxde, E17, and KDE. This feels a lot like the old days.
Firefox still crashes weekly when quiescent, most typically in GC cycle detection. I tried running with ulimit 2G, and it crashed immediately. With 3G it runs for a day or two. It's hard for me to contemplate how absurd this is.
The first functional language that does not depend on GC might well take over the world