A Switch

A few weeks ago, or perhaps months, I saw that there was the release of Gnome 3.0. I had also seen that Ubuntu had released 11.04 Beta. Feeling like I needed to get my fix, I went ahead and wiped my old 10.10 partition and did a fresh install of the Beta.

On first full boot into the GUI, I was surprised at the slowness of everything. I decided to do some research to see if it was due to Gnome3 or quite possibly a bug in the beta. After quickly finding out that Ubuntu uses a new interface called Unity, I began to look into the technology behind it. Unitity is based off Gnome 2 and the only way to get close to Gnome 3, would be to run unsupported packages that are partially broken.

It was this basic finding that I decided that I wanted to have more control over my OS then what Ubuntu was now offering. I found out that Debian had began pushing Gnome 3 to their experimental repositories, so I installed Lenny and dist-upgraded to Wheezy. From there, I pulled the experimental packages for Gnome by running:

apt-get install -t experimental gnome

My advise for anyone wishing to go this route, is to make sure that you only install the Gnome 3 packages from experimental and be ready to see some glitches. Believe it or not, being back on bleeding edge is far more interesting to me. This may even bring me back to my Debian packaging days and add my hand to help the Debian team get all of Gnome 3 working and pushed to testing.