Animesh Kumar {itsAnimesh}

I have to say initially i was quite skeptical about GNOME 3 and the new Gnome Shell design, but having used them for a week  now I’m pleasantly surprised…

Gnome 3 is not a small upgrade for GNOME… nearly 5 years of work has gone into this with around 3500 developers working around the clock… This is a massive change from the earlier versions of GNOME…

Its got sort of a polarizing effect on GNOME fans… You adore GNOME 3 or you simply end up hating it… But overall looks like most of the fans seem to like this change…

The first time you fire up GNOME 3, the most noticeable change is the lack of, well, anything familiar… You’ll see a tool-bar at the top of the screen with a clock and some familiar panels for Wi-Fi, volume and the like, but there is no bottom panel and no menu items to click on save one – “Activities”… The Activities menu is your gateway into the new GNOME Shell. The GNOME Shell sits on top of the desktop and moves aside the traditional window lists and menu bars in favor of what the GNOME team believes is a more streamlined interface with fewer distractions… So instead of a messy desktop of icons or a Start Menu, Gnome-Shell puts your application shortcuts and active windows behind a screen you activate by merely throwing your mouse into the top left corner… I forgot what rule of GUI design this adheres to, but its the same philosophy behind Mac OS X’s application menus: instead of having to specifically aim for something, you just throw the mouse against the screen edge and you’re where you want to be…

Like Mac OS X’s dock, your favorite applications are located in a favorites panel for easy access, or you can navigate all your applications in categories… Previews of all your active windows are also contained in a tab, much like Mac OS X’s Expose which is vastly superior to Windows’s awkward Alt+Tab and cluttered task-bar… One thin what i really like is the quick keyboard application launcher. Being able to simply type the name of an application I want and hitting enter is so convenient I’m lost when I go to a machine that doesn’t have it…

The other important feature to view is the new notifications system, which introduces persistent notification messages. The message tray in GNOME Shell will pop-up alerts, (just like GNOME 2 does), for a certain period of time… But, in GNOME 3, even after the message time expires, the notification message is still available in the message tray… The persistent messages mean that you no longer need to interrupt your work and immediately deal with the message window during the short time it’s visible… In GNOME 3 the message will be there whenever you decide to interact with it. In some cases – like instant messaging – you can even respond to a new message without leaving your current app. Just click the message, type your reply and send it – all from the notification window… AWESOME right???

Nice though GNOME 3 may be, I don’t suggest upgrading just yet… It is an unfinished product, this is essentially a 1.0 release and not everything is quite there just yet. But more important most distros haven’t yet fully integrated with GNOME 3…

If you’d like to get up to speed on GNOME 3 before your favorite distro ships it, you can grab a live CD from the GNOME website…