Linux Desktop Environment

I still plan on running Linux at home, but I'm at somewhat of a crossroads since GNOME 2 is being discontinued. GNOME 3 and Unity have had mixed reviews, so who knows where they will end up. But this makes me interested in LXDE and xfce.

I was a big fan of the Mint Menu in Mint 11, so that drew me to the Mint xfce edition. Unfortunately it is a rolling release, which reminds me of Mint LMDE and the train wreck that it was a few months ago.

Turns out that what I'm really interested in is a good launcher. Mint Menu is decent as a launcher, but what I was really after was an application like GNOME Do or Launchy, or the GNOME Deskbar applet. The environment's menuing, etc. hardly matters when a good launcher is available.

So now I am leaning towards LXDE (Lubuntu?). Probably won't make any moves until Ubuntu 12.04 is released, since it is LTS. VMware Player is a nice way to give these things a try, but unfortunately Unity and GNOME 3 require a bare metal install due to hardware graphics acceleration.