April 6th is finally here and those of us who have been keeping track of GNOME 3 development, you know that means the release of GNOME 3 desktop featuring Gnome Shell. GNOME 3 and Gnome Shell are a dramatic shift from what users have come to expect from GNOME 2.
From the press release:
Today, the GNOME Desktop project released GNOME 3.0, its most significant redesign of the computer experience in nine years. A revolutionary new user interface and new features for developers make this a historic moment for the free and open source desktop.
Within GNOME 3, GNOME Shell reimagines the user interface for the next generation of the desktop. This innovative interface allows users to focus on tasks while minimizing distractions such as notifications, extra workspaces, and background windows.
Fedora 15 will feature GNOME 3 as their default desktop when they release in May. Up next in the release cycle will be Ubuntu and their Unity that will be the default desktop for their upcoming 11.04 Natty release. It will be interesting how the two compare as they share many of the same design elements and functionality.
Installation
At the moment you can download Live CD images for both Fedora and openSUSE but no distribution currently has it in their repositories.
If you are running Ubuntu and want to try it out as your default desktop, there is an article on how to build the latest version from source.