There’s been some grumbling among the Gnome community about if and when Gnome would have a major overhaul. Well with Gnome 3 we’ll have it in the form of Gnome Shell. It pretty much replaces the panel and window manager in a normal Gnome installation with a fully composited environment with some great new functionality.

Simple launcher for the GNOME desktop, providing easy access to Places, Applications and common configuration items for your computer.

Today I finally managed to get GNOME Shell installed so I could get a preview of what is to come on the Linux desktop (at least through the eyes of GNOME). GNOME 3 is different. Very different.

If you like a clean, tidy Gnome desktop, you probably don't want it littered with file shortcut icons. Wouldn't it be nice to have a drop-down (or drop-up) file menu in one of the Gnome panels, from which you could select and launch your frequently used documents, spreadsheets, images, etc?

I used KDE as my primary desktop from 1996 through 2006, when I installed the GNOME version of Ubuntu and found that I liked it better than the KDE desktop I'd faced every morning for so many years. Last January, I got a new Dell Latitude D630 laptop and decided to install Kubuntu on it, but within a few weeks, I went back to GNOME.

Sabayon Linux is a very full featured DVD sized distribution that is really catching on in the Linux community as of late. The most recent release, Sabayon 4.1 Gnome, includes some very impressive features, and applications. I installed Sabayon 4.1 Gnome this morning and found some great stuff, I really have nothing but good things to say about this up and coming Linux distro.

Gnome Shell is a redesign to the way the gnome desktop looks and works. I find it very interesting, because it stops trying to base itself on windows' functionality and design, and instead it consists of an original design and functionality.

If you want your application to have the widest reach possible, it would be a good idea to ensure they play nice with both KDE and GNOME. Follow Kunal Deo's brief tutorial to find out how to get started

GNOME Do (Do) is an intelligent launcher tool that makes performing common tasks on your computer simple and efficient. “GNOME Do” not only allows you to search for items in your desktop environment (e.g. applications, contacts, bookmarks, files, music), it also allows you to specify actions to perform on search results (e.g. run, open, email, chat, play).