New Releases Of GNOME Shell, Mutter

[phoronix]

Phoronix: New Releases Of GNOME Shell, Mutter

Owen Taylor has announced a new development release of GNOME Shell in the run-up to GNOME 3.0, which is coming now in just a few short months. This newest release of the GNOME Shell continues to bring changes to the user-interface, visual improvements, Shell Toolkit improvements, and plenty of other work...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODM2OA

[d2kx]

Gnome Shell vs. Unity - this will be a real battle in a few months. Canonical has released a new video that shows some of the very new features of Unity and they look fantastic, while Gnome Shell on the other side has a big group of supporters behind them as well. And yes, I am aware Unity was meant for netbooks only but this is something that could change faster than people might think.

[MaestroMaus]

I can't imagine Unity doing anything. Especially not under the hardcore crowd. I can imagine it might stomp a little dent in the marketshare on the netbooks though. What makes you think other people will adopt it?

[etnlWings]

Just a few months? Ouch. On the plus side, it really does seem like the Gnome devs are going to avoid the mass-breakage of the KDE 4.0 release. After all, you can't break features, when they don't exist. *rim-shot*

[Delgarde]

I can't imagine Unity doing anything. Especially not under the hardcore crowd. I can imagine it might stomp a little dent in the marketshare on the netbooks though. What makes you think other people will adopt it?

Unity looks very nice for Netbooks - I'll have to give it a try, see if it actually works that well in practice. But in either case, it definitely doesn't look suitable for larger desktops...

[liam]

I installed Unity on my netbook a few days ago (running UNR 10.04) and it's OK. The dock is not great. Well, actually it works beautifully (amongst the smoothest animation/easing I've seen on Linux), but it doesn't hide(so your screen is effectively 30px or so smaller), the accordion is a bit useless if you expect to use this with your finger (or you want to know what is actually "folded"), and, basically, the dock doesn't add much other than looks. The original UNR interface is much better for touchscreens, but it needs a way (like Gnome Shell) to easily expose all the windows. Hey, here's an idea: USE GNOME SHELL! I've been using it on and off for months and it works fine. Recently they've shortened the animation time to Overlay (I know this had been asked for many months ago), so switching windows with your mouse is faster (still not as fast as using a panel, however, but we'll see what happens).
If you haven't tried it, give it a shot. It is very stable and jhbuild makes it trivial to get the latest.