I’m a little behind the news but for those that aren’t aware, Gnome has officially released 3.0. It’s a stunner if I may say. You can see plenty of visuals at Gnome’s website. If you want to give it a spin, Gnome is offering three live images that can be burned to CD or placed on a USB key. Two are built on openSUSE for either 32-bit or 64-bit machines, one is built on Fedora for 32-bit machines.

I downloaded the Fedora live image and had mixed luck. My spare Acer Extensa 4420 could get to the desktop with a movable mouse but nothing to interact with. I suspect it has to do with video drivers as Gnome 3 requires hardware acceleration for the “full Gnome experience”. It has an ATI Radeon Xpress video chipset and has not always easiest to use. After a few unsuccessful tries, I moved the live image to my desktop gaming machine which is pretty robust with nVidia graphics, tons of ram, and plenty of CPU. That’s when Gnome 3 came alive, and it was good.

There’s still some polishing that needs to be made, such as the integrated chat not displaying correctly, the behavior of taking a screenshot forced me to look for the screenshot window instead of having it appear as it does in 2.3, and at some point the whole system froze up.

I had install Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal onto the Extensa right before the announcement came out and was please to see that there’s an experimental PPA for Gnome 3 on Natty, and it’s very unstable, trust me. I finally gave up after trying a few things to get it to work. I’ll keep updating the system as time goes by hoping to find the sweet spot where everything works. It might be a while since changes are being made to both the release of Ubuntu and the Gnome 3 PPA.

At the very least, grab one of the live images and give Gnome 3 a free spin. It’s definitely the direction I want to see my desktop going. It does seem to require hardware video acceleration and will default to the familiar Gnome 2 desktop if it should fail to load Gnome 3.

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