GNOME has never managed to impress me one bit. It looks and acts like a 90's environment. To me, the only reason for its mass adoption was Qt's licensing (and history would agree). I see no technical or aesthetical benefit. It took me only a couple of hours to create a small in-house cross-platform accounting utility with Qt and Python - with the help of designer & py2exe. It looks and works great on Linux _and_ Windows.

On the other hand, Enlightenment is a fine piece of art. Couple it with KDE, disable composite extensions, and you have the perfect blend of beauty and usability. With KDE, you get what you expect, you get what you want, and you get what you see, unlike GNOME.

For audio though, one should look at Juce instead.