Huh? Do you know what a thin client is? There is no HDD, the machines boot from the net and connect to the server, for everything, this has a much reduced rate of failure as no longer have to worry about the HDD, you also have reduced costs by not having to pay for the Windows and Office licenses. You may think that this causes a single point of failire, but anyone running this type of setup will have it running on multiple virtualized servers, so if one has to be taken offline for maintenance the users are none the wiser.

Miss Nautalus? Try Mate http://mate-desktop.org/ as it's Gnome2.

Really? I'm running Linux Mint 12 on a 2Ghz P4 Northwood with 1Gb of DDR 266Mhz ram and a PCI Geforce 6200, runs plenty fast to me, though I am running the Mate desktop instead of Cinnamon or Gnome-Shell. The only speed problems I can attribute are paging out due to having too many Firefox tabs open, the lack of HD video capability and the weakness of the GPU for games that the CPU is otherwise able to handle well enough, think Humble Bundle and OSS type games.

Solyndra was a Bush program and was designed from the start to fail. What do you expect when they where selling pannels for less then the cost of manufacturing?