Originally Posted By: NJC
Thanks Buickman, I hadn't considered Gnome 3. It looks worthy of an experiment.
Just watching your video now.
[EDIT: I now remember steering clear of Gnome 3.2, because
even Linus Torvalds hated it. ]
Here's a comparison of Unity vs Gnome 3.
http://lifehacker.com/5853099/linux-desktop-faceoff-gnome-3-vs-ubuntu-unity
Is anyone finding Unity quick on their Ubuntu 12.04 installation. If so, what specs are you using? Maybe I can justify a Radeon HD 6670 video card.
Be warned: Gnome-shell (Gnome 3) is a great departure from how you think about operating a desktop computer! Whether it be Gnome 3.2, 3.4 or anything else in the 3.x series I am pretty sure Linus will hate it and stick with XFCE. You can always use gnome-fallback, though, to closely simulate Gnome 2's interface and resource usage. (Gnome-shell is by no means a resource hog, but needs some pretty fancy-pants graphics horsepower to run correctly.) Some distro's are starting to use MATE, a fork of Gnome 2, and/ or Cinnamon, Linux Mint's fork of Gnome 3.
You'll also need some considerable graphics power to run Unity's default (Unity 3D). They have a Unity interface (Unity 2D) that doesn't require graphics acceleration, but they wrote it in Qt which takes up a lot of RAM (most of the rest of the OS use "GTK" instead of "Qt", so loading up a bunch of Qt libraries just to run the darn dock seems a little weird...).