Thursday 07 April 2011
GNOME 3 First Look
As some of you may or may not know, the new GNOME interface GNOME 3 (or GNOME Shell) got released today. I haven’t tried it running in Ubuntu 11.04 just yet (that will come in the next few days). For now, I have downloaded the Suse GNOME 3 ‘try it’ version from the GNOME 3 website. Your can download this or the fedora version yourself from HERE.
Thoughts
It’s different, very different! In my humble opinion I see it as a mish-mash between the Ubuntu Unity interface and GNOME 2. Instead of the normal Applications, Places & System menus you instead have a single Activities button that opens a menu where you have a set of quick launch icons on the left, a search bar at the top right and a field down the right hand side that resembles the old applications menu.
After some playing around with the new GNOME 3 shell, I found it alien and unfamiliar. It has subtle similarities to GNOME 2 but for me, it’s just too far removed from the GNOME 3 we all know and love. I personally would rather see KDE make a come back to becoming the main linux GUI over this. I don’t think it will be very popular, but I am only one person with one opinion, only time will tell I suppose!
Jing