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.

Window List is a Gnome Panel applet - the default way to view the list of all windows that are currently running in Gnome.

I do not question the original Choice of GNOME over KDE or any other DE or Window Manager either... My opinion, however, is that this choice of GNOME over KDE is outdated. It doesn’t consider the past and future evolutions of both desktop. I believe that GNOME doesn’t serve the goals of Ubuntu.

GNOME 3.8 has been released today, the new version bringing many new features and enhancements, including a new application view and overhauled window layout for GNOME Shell, new setting panels for privacy, search and notifications and of course, many updates to the core GNOME apps like Web (Epiphany), Boxes, Documents and more.

Let's take a look at what's new!

Everywhere you go, any building you enter, any OS you operate, any settings window you open, one rule remains set in stone, “THE ESCAPE DOOR”. Always give an exit path, a way to make it all go away, make it look like nothing happened. But Gnome seems to think otherwise. Any settings window you open, all you see is a “close” button.

GNOME Do is a fantastic little program that makes Linux Mint a very comfortable experience. At first glance, GNOME Do just looks like a collection of launchers that can be docked to your window, with a search function attached for completeness.

Gnome Shell is the future window manager for UNIX-like operating systems running the Gnome desktop environment. It is slated to be part of the Gnome 3.0, which will probably be released sometime next year. However, this does not mean you cannot try Gnome Shell now and get the first impression of what it ought to be.

A few days back we reported on a new Mutter release, which is the window and compositing manager for GNOME 3.0, and now with the GNOME 2.29.91 beta release coming up on Wednesday there is also the release of another new GNOME 3.0 component. Perhaps the single biggest new component for the GNOME 3.x stack is the GNOME Shell and this is the package that just reached version 2.29.0.

Just check out this to how you can change the whole way in which UBUNTU and all other distros with GNOME look and feel.
Perhaps there are countless developers and even more modifications for every part of Gnome be it Windows, Icons, Splash Screens or the Login Window.