How to install Gnome 3 on Ubuntu 11.04 and still have a stable system?

[Liam Proven]

On 15 May 2011 19:13, Amedee Van Gasse <amedee-ubuntu at amedee.be> wrote:
> On 05/15/11 17:19, Liam Proven wrote:
>>
>> On 15 May 2011 14:45, Amedee Van Gasse<amedee-ubuntu at amedee.be>  wrote:
>>>
>>> For me, Linux is all about choice.
>>> Suppose I wanted to install Gnome 3 on Ubuntu 11.04, how would I do that?
>>> I
>>> have done my homework and used Google, but everything I found involves
>>> adding ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 to the repository, and included a warning
>>> that
>>> it will break Unity and that there was no downgrade path. But most of
>>> these
>>> things were at least 2 months old, so before 11.04 was released.
>>> I really want to have my cookie AND eat it, iow when I log in I want to
>>> choose between Gnome 3 today, Unity tomorrow, KDE the day after and
>>> Fluxbox
>>> the day after that.
>>>
>>> Anyone here who has successfully installed Gnome 3 on 11.04 and still has
>>> Unity?
>>
>> You can't. Not for now. Unity currently is built on GNOME 2. Install
>> GNOME 3, it irretrievably breaks Unity.
>>
>> 11.10 might fix this. 12.04 probably will, because there is a
>> statement that Unity will be moved onto the newer GNOME libraries
>> soon. But not the current version.
>>
> OK thank you. That explains a few things. So its either Gnome 2 + Unity or
> Gnome 3 + Gnome Shell at this moment, and I'll have to watch the alphas and
> betas of 11.10 very closely to see if I can get a choice between Gnome 3 +
> Unity and Gnome 3 + Gnome Shell.
>
> *goes off to fill yet another partition with an ubuntu installation*

Yes, that's the deal at the moment. It's a time of changes in the
GNOME world... we don't yet know exactly where we're going to end up.

There's GNOME Shell  that runs on top of GNOME 3, which, broadly, the
RPM-based GNOME distros are going to use. (I.e., SUSE & Fedora. I
don't think Mandriva has declared yet, but it focuses more on KDE.)

There's "fallback mode", which is GNOME 3's equivalent of "Ubuntu
classic". It resembles classic GNOME 2 broadly, but simplified
somewhat. This is what Linux Mint 12 is going to use - Mint 11 will
use GNOME 2.32, AIUI.

And sooner or later someone will probably do an Ubuntu remix with
GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell.

In a year or so, everyone will probably be based on the GNOME 3
libraries, and your choices will be:

Got decent hardware 3D? GNOME Shell or Unity
Poor or no 3D? GNOME 3 fallback mode or Unity 2D.


-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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