I recently got fed up of running Ubuntu classic and decided to give Gnome 3.0 a shot.
Unity had already left a nasty taste in my user experience and didn’t really work correctly, so I thought whats have I got to lose by installing Gnome 3.0 on top of Ubuntu 11.04.
Generally the instructions are simply…
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
Gnome 3.0 worked great except all the fonts are not right. I’m tempted to reinstall or do something to my preference configs.
Ah but then I solved the problem with the following commands
sudo apt-get remove gnome-accessibility-themes
sudo apt-get install gnome-themes-standard
Generally I am missing Compiz and that rotating cube but I just couldn’t deal with Unity. Actually I quite like Gnome 3’s interface… I also like the way there going with it. This is from the Gnome site.
GNOME 3 is designed to reduce distraction and interruption and to put you in control. Our new notifications system subtly presents messages and will save them until you are ready for them, and the GNOME 3 panel has been styled so that it is part of the background, not the foreground. These changes allow you to focus on your creative tasks.
Exactly what I what I’m after, I always turn on auto hide on all menus because the last thing I want is stuff clouding my viewpoint. I Unity is distracting and requires too much screen space. And to make things worst, it doesn’t seem to scale for multiple monitors like I have at work.
I do find Gnome 3 application menu a little odd and more like an answer to Unity but its a lot more logical. The only thing which did my head in was the tie to the Super key (Windows key) because I tend to use that key for Gnome-Do. Which makes me wonder where Gnome-Do fits in Gnome 3?
Will I be installing Gnome 3.0 on my work machine? Well maybe… We shall see. I do miss Compiz but seeing how Gnome 3 doesn’t support Compiz and Compiz is now tied to Unity, I’m kind of between a rock and a hard place. I was looking forward to installing some of the experimental plugins including the screensaver.
Now all we need is a new distro which is built on Ubuntu but runs Gnome 3.