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John
Asked: 2011-03-09 22:26:02 +0800 CST

Will I be able to switch to Gnome-Shell in 11.04?

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I'm a bit confused about whether or not Gnome-shell is a new distribution or just a desktop environment? Will shell be available to install and use instead of Unity?

11.04

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    About gnome-shell

    gnome-shell is just a shell and not a new distribution or desktop environment.

    The Desktop Environment is Gnome and gnome-shell the shell comes with version3 of Gnome Desktop Environment

    Please don't confuse gnome-shell or unity with Window Manager too. Both of them are not window manager. For gnome-shell the WM is Mutter and for unity WM is Compiz.

    Availability in Natty

    With respect to availability of gnome-shell in Ubuntu, it won't be in 11.04. It is present in a PPA. There were some valid technical reasons for keeping it in a PPA. This bug discusses the issue Quoting from it

    Due to the state of the GNOME3 stack in natty, we won't be able to 
upgrade gnome-shell to 2.91.x. In addition, due to libraries that 
have already changed, (Bug #685225 and Bug #677382), gnome-shell 
is currently broken. We also have the xulrunner-2.0 transition to 
consider. Due to all this, we believe it best to remove gnome-shell 
from natty.

    Also I found a mail titled Status update on GNOME3 and natty sent by Sebastian Bacher dated Jan 20th 2011. It contains a lot of status updates. Go through it.

    Instructions for trying GNOME3 (and GNOME Shell) are at this question:

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