I have been an ubuntu fan for years now. I have worked as a server administrator on multiple distributions ranging from the Red Hat side doing admin work on RHEL and CentOS to the Debian side doing admin work on straight Debian and Ubuntu boxes and even doing admin work on BSD, Solaris and Suse. I also run a Linux distro on my home PC as well.

For production servers I am definitely a “use what’s stable and secure” kind of person but on my home desktop I tend to be more of a “bleeding-edger”. It is common for me to run beta versions of software, and sometimes even alpha versions, including my distro. Before Ubuntu 10.10 Beta1 came out I was running a minimal install of Ubuntu 10.04 that I then threw gnome-shell on top of… and I really liked it. After Beta1 came out I installed that and was very pleased to find that getting gnome shell on it was as easy as installing the gnome-shell package straight from the repository… everything worked amazingly.  It was even possible to switch between Unity and gnome-shell from GDM (the login screen) which was something that never did work properly with gnome-shell in 10.04 (once you went to shell… unity was broken).

Read on to see my experiences so far with it!