Well I gave unity the old college try in ubuntu 11.04. But last night I just couldn’t take it any more. There were some small rendering issues occasionally plus some tray programs like workrave had no place to go, at least that I could find anyway and I really need workrave to remind me to change from sitting to standing positions every so often.
At any rate I decided to try gnome3 and gnome-shell. Its pretty easy to install
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get install gnome-shell sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool
Then I dont know what process needed killed but just restarting X didnt seem to work for me, I rebooted and selected “Gnome” from the session selection bar.
My first impressions so far … much better. I think its a cleaner look. I use synapse a gnome-do like launcher any time i want to launch a program so for me an application dock is mostly a waste of time. Its clear that unity and gnome-shell have many ideas in common, I just think gnome-shell looks better and stays out of my way more out of the box.
And if you want to remove gnome-shell try the following
sudo apt-get install ppa-purge sudo ppa-purge ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3