Among this Linux spring novelties the release of the latest Gnome desktop version has probably been the most awaited. There has been on the Internet a lot of discussing about this Gnome release and if it could have been more fit than Unity as Ubuntu’s default desktop. I know I will not add a lot of information to the whole discussion but, anyway, I couldn’t not to give a look myself to the so long awaited Gnome 3.
Download and preparation
The easiest, and cleanest, way to test a desktop environment is running it from a live distribution disk. On Gnome download page there are two distributions available: one based on openSuse , the other based on Fedora. I decided to download and test the Fedora based disk image, almost a random decision since I was interested in testing only Gnome and not the whole distribution. For some reason Ubuntu USB disk preparation tool seems not to work with non Ubuntu images. Fortunately I had Unetbootin already installed and it had no problems to prepare a bootable SD card from the downloaded image.
First impressions
After the boot (that has been quite fast indeed) Gnome 3 welcomes you with a neat empty screen