GNOME3 "shells"

One of the cool things about GNOME 3 is how different distros are creating their own customized shells for it. GNOME Shell, of course, is the default. Ubuntu has Unity, Linux Mint has Cinnamon, and the new SolusOS release (still in "alpha") will have its own shell, which I think is still unnamed.

LinuxBSDos.com has a preview of Pear Linux 5, an Ubuntu-based distro that comes with another GNOME shell:




And Linux Deepin 12.06, another Ubuntu-based distro, has been released, with yet another spin on things:




Interestingly, the LinuxBSDos preview of Deepin 12.06 has this to say:

Linux Deepin is one of the very few distributions that use the GNOME 3 desktop that I will gladly recommend to anybody, even first time users of Linux. It is probably the best Ubuntu-based distribution, and in many respects, it is even better than its parent distribution.

Nice compliment, there. But Deepin is made in China, so I'm wondering about the English-language support. Also, these days I'd rather just run Ubuntu and stay away from any of the many Ubuntu spin-offs.

So far, I'm happy to stick with GNOME Shell and Unity in GNOME 3, although I've also got Cinnamon installed here, in Fedora 16. I can't say that I'm real excited about the shells I've seen so far that try to make GNOME 3 look and behave like GNOME 2, which was never a favorite of mine to begin with. But as things continue to evolve, the situation can only get better and better for Linux users, and perhaps folks will end up thanking the GNOME devs for ever putting GNOME 3 out there.