Why do all Gnome 3/shell distros look the same?
I'm a massive fan of Gnome 3/shell. I used it for 6 months on openSUSE, when I switched away from Ubuntu during Natty's launch, and it was just brilliant. I took to it very quickly, it seemed to make sense and was attractive. There was no distro-tailoring that said "this is openSUSE", but it didn't matter as it was released after their Gnome 2 version had already shipped and was only obtainable via a 1-click installer and not part of the main 11.4 release. Nevertheless, it worked extremely well and looked/looks fantastic. But I expected to see, as more distros adopted Gnome 3, some branding and tailoring to make each individual distro stand out, just as they had with Gnome 2.
But now I look at the next releases using Gnome 3.2, and they all look the same. There's nothing, at least visually, between the G3 offerings from openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch etc. They all look the same. Now obviously under the hood they'll have their differences, but I am very surprised that they haven't added their branding and identities to their Gnome 3 releases.
Is there a technical reason for this? It seems very odd if a distro cannot add their own unique ID's to their releases. On that score at the very least I can understand why Ubuntu decided to go it alone with Unity. At least when you see it, it says uniquely "this is Ubuntu".
I'm not ragging on Gnome 3/shell, as I love it, just as I do Unity. It works well and is very pretty by default to be fair. But it does strike me as odd that while people are having a go at Ubuntu for offering their vision of the desktop that the user cannot customise, no-one is saying "but hang on, Gnome 3 is inflexible too".
What gives?
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