GNOME 3 Myths

This page hopes to dispel myths about the upcoming GNOME 3 release.

My computer and/or graphics card isn't powerful enough to run GNOME 3

Actually, most likely it is.

From the the GNOME Shell FAQ: It is our primary focus to build a modern operating environment, platform, and user experience. It doesn't make sense to target the hardware of the past. GNOME Shell uses relatively primitive 3D capabilities that have been available from essentially all computing devices made in the last four or five years. This includes most desktop and laptop computers, mobile devices, phones, tablets, and netbooks. Where there are exceptions, largely, there are bugs we can and should fix.

So, the official plan is that people can still use the GNOME 2 shell with GNOME 3 applications and libraries, if necessary, but this is a transitional state, and to get the GNOME 3 experience, your computer needs hardware acceleration.

GNOME won't support the current panel and window manager anymore

While it is true that the GNOME 3 experience will not include the panel as it was in GNOME 2, the window manager used in GNOME 3 will use a window manager that behaves consistently with the GNOME 2 window manager (metacity). This is because it uses most of the same code.

It is important to emphasize that GNOME 2 technologies will still be available through the usual channels for some time.

Downstream distributions such as Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu will have the option to include them in their distribution.

I can't use Compiz with GNOME Shell!

Because the GNOME Shell project wanted "tighter integration" between the panel and window manager than cooperating with the Compiz project would allow, this could actually be true. This mailing list post has more information.

The GNOME file manager (Nautilus) will be removed from GNOME and replaced with the GNOME Activity Journal!

Nautilus will still be available as the default GNOME file manager.
In fact, Nautilus is going through a number of changes to help with GNOME 3.0 integration, such as using browser mode by default, rather than spatial, as GNOME Shell has some overlapping features. This mailing list post has more information.

GNOME 3.0 depends on Mono!

There are no changes compared to the last GNOME releases.
Currently, the only application written with the Mono bindings is the notetaking application Tomboy, which has been part of GNOME since version 2.16, released in 2006. Tomboy will, of course, continue to be available in GNOME 3.0, but no component introduced explicitly in GNOME 3.0 will depend on Mono — GNOME Shell is written in C and Javascript; Zeitgeist and the GNOME Activity Journal use Python. You can safely remove Tomboy if you don't like it. Alternatively, Gnote can be used, which is a port of Tomboy to C++. Other Mono based applications, like F-Spot and Banshee, are not officially part of the GNOME release and have alternatives such as Shotwell, Rhythmbox and others.

My favorite GNOME 2 apps won't work with GNOME 3 and I'll have to wait for ages before they get ported

Applications will not require changes to work in GNOME 3

However, application authors will want to take advantage of the advancements in GNOME 3 and will likely port applications as time allows.

My current GTK and Metacity themes won't work with GNOME 3

The window manager in GNOME 3 is almost entirely feature compatible with the GNOME 2 window manager. While we plan to ship a much improved theme with GNOME 3, there is no active effort to prevent using existing GNOME 2 themes.

Moving to Clutter will ruin some of the existing accessibility features

Work is ongoing to add accessibility support to the Clutter framework. While it may take some time to reach feature parity with GNOME 2, we are confident that universal access will be greatly enhanced in GNOME 3. We should be able to take advantages of new technologies and fix some of the problems that have dogged GNOME 2 accessibility efforts.

Zeitgeist was removed from GNOME 3

This was stated in some forums and on some news pages, but is not true. Zeitgeist (and GNOME Activity Journal) were proposed for inclusion for GNOME 2.32 and rejected at that time. The maintainers did not repropose them for 3.0.