Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register)

What I'm saying is that there was an unstated "assumption" that I and others had that GNOME was going to continue to cater to us because it had (happened to) in the past. But there was never a stated intent to do that, just happenstance that many of us took as implication. So my point is that it's very important to consider the goals for projects before relying on them. I *should* have looked at where GNOME wanted to go years ago and planned for contingency at that point, but I let myself get comfortable with 2.x because it's what was there and being offered by default on many distros. The correct thing to do in the future (for me) is to find a project like Xfce that promises to remain "boring" forever and to stick with it, not just to find a GNOME 2.x clone. It needs to be both bland and promise to remain so.