Ok, so Gnome 2.16 came out a while ago. There are lots of new features. Yay for the foot.
Now I bet Apple fanboys are screaming right now. I don't blame them. For the rest of you who don't know why people would be screaming, its fairly simple. Default Gnome is ass-ugly. Thank God the Ubuntu folks made their own theme, otherwise no one would be using Gnome at all. I'll swear by that.
"Now where did I put my Pokemon cards? Oh I must have left them in 1996 along with this desktop. Seriously, this is not the GUI of the future."
http://techoncrack.blogspot.com/2006/09/why-is-gnome-so-ugly.html