Gnome as Default

[henrywm]

Can you suggest a general purpose and well-supported distro of Ubuntu that uses GNOME by default? Ubuntu was like that until they switched to Unity, but I prefer GNOME. I see that Linux Mint still uses GNOME, but I understand there are legal issues with it in some countries (which ones?). I see Ultimate Edition uses GNOME. How is it compared with Ubuntu? On the other hand it may be easier just to use GNOME on regular Ubuntu.

[raja.genupula]

have you tried Gnome-shell in ubuntu?

[henrywm]

Is that different from the GNOME environment available in the Software Center?

[raja.genupula]

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

yup this will gives you the Gnome desktop and for more info look at this

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-install-gnome-shell-in-ubuntu-11-10-oneiric-ocelot.html

[henrywm]

That looks the same as the GNOME environment that I can get from the Software Center.

[raja.genupula]

no its not . do as i have given to you .

[Frogs Hair]

Which Gnome do you want ? Gnome 2 is not available for any release after 11.04 . Unity in 11.10 , the Gnome Shell , and the Gnome Fall-Back Session all run on top of Gnome 3 . Gnome 2 is no longer supported by Gnome . Scientific Linux , Mint , and some Red Hat based ditros still use it.

[3Miro]

Unity is Gnome as it is just a shell on top of Gnome 3. Gnome 3 comes with a whole bunch of apps, settings deamons etc and WM called Gnome-shell, Canonical replaces Gnome-shell with Compiz+Unity, but they keep the rest of Gnome 3. This is exactly what they did in 10.04, when Ubuntu came with Gnome 2 + Compiz as opposed to Gnome 2 + Metacity.

If you want to use Gnome-shell, then install it from the Software Center, you don't have to change distros.

If you want to use Gnome 2, it is no longer officially supported. You can look at Debian 6 that will support is for few more years or alternatives like Mate, Cinnamon, Xfce4, KDE or LXDE.