The GNOME Foundation, which has overseen the development of the default graphical environments for the Linux- and Unix-based operating systems from Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and others, has diverged from the consistent look and feel that marked its namesake desktop environment for years, with its new GNOME Shell interface.
GNOME Shell represents a new desktop approach intended to make applications easier to access, limit workspace distractions and make more use of modern desktop and notebook hardware.
Canonical, for its part, has broken ranks with GNOME by opting to not participate in GNOME Shell, instead developing for Ubuntu a separate interface, called “Unity.” Unity is rooted in many of the same components and designed with many of the same goals as GNOME, albeit with different implementation details.
I’ve found each interface promising. Each does a solid job streamlining notification messages and staying out of the way of active applications. With that said, both will require that users spend time adapting, and the enhanced hardware requirements of each will prove troublesome in certain scenarios.
In particular, in virtualised or thin-client style deployments, where hardware acceleration for graphics isn’t available, these desktop environments must fall back to their earlier incarnations. However, there’s time for users and implementers to adjust to GNOME Shell and Unity, as the operating systems shipping these environments are aimed at Linux enthusiasts and early adopters.
The next Long Term Support version of Canonical’s Ubuntu is set to ship a year from now, with an October release of the OS in between to address usability and hardware fallback issues. A 2D version of Unity is already available in the Ubuntu repositories. As for GNOME Shell, it’s not clear when the new interface will make its way into the enterprise operating systems from Red Hat, Novell or Oracle.
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View Comments
Jason,
I recognize that there are many changes to both UBUNTU and Fedora. Gnome3 has a mode of GUI interface that you omitted, either by number of inches to write, by lack of time, or just a standard omission.
The Gnome3 interface without fall-back to "Graphics Off" mode is a real time waste. There are too many keystrokes to get what you need to see. If you have two items open, they are typically on different "Desktops". Sliding them together onto the same desktop makes each non executable.
However....
With the graphics off mode, we get most of the new functionality, and the familiar ability to set up more than one desktop as we could do in the past. Gnome3 fall-back is the winner, and the lifesaver for Gnome, in my opinion.
Please do a follow up article about the Gnome3 fall-back option.
In contrast, Unity allows you to view (4) desktop images on your display, and by clicking on one of them, it expands to full screen. This is another approach to satisfy we old Gnome/KDE users who are accustomed to having 4 desktops.
In closing, I enjoy your writing style and excuse my verbose feedback.
Leslie (Montreal QC, Canada)