As you may have heard, Mark Shuttleworth announced his vision for Ubuntu 10.10 a few days ago.  Without prejudicing the more pressing release of Ubuntu 10.04 in a couple weeks, here are some thoughts on what Shuttleworth said, and what we can expect from Ubuntu 10.10 in October 2010.

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote some posts on GNOME Shell which included a number of criticisms of the desktop environment that will likely become Ubuntu’S default at some point in the future.  Jon McCann, lead designer for GNOME Shell, recently got in touch to offer his responses to the problems I found with the new interface.  Here’s what he had to say.

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A few days ago, I installed the release candidate for Gnome 2.30, which provides an overview of what Gnome 3 will look like when it appears next fall.  Since I’ve begun using Gnome 2.30, I’ve become more disappointed by the hour with the way it works.  Here’s a list of the top five flaws in Gnome 2.30 that will make me an LXDE user if they are not addressed before the Gnome 3 release.

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If Gnome developers are to be believed, the desktop of the future arrived last week when the release candidate for Gnome 2.30–which could become Gnome 3.0–was made available.  My CPU needed a workout, so I recently compiled the new desktop and gave it a run.  Here’s a look at the desktop environment that–like it or not–may soon be coming to a computer near you.

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The default positioning of window-management buttons in Ubuntu 10.04 has generated a lot of controversy. But given the decreasing importance of these buttons in modern desktop environments, I’m left wondering if the issue is really so important.  In a year or two, after all, window titlebars may be a thing of the past.

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If all goes according to plan, Ubuntu 10.10 will sport Gnome 3, which represents a radical overhaul of Ubuntu’s default graphical user interface in the form of Gnome Shell, when it debuts a year from now.  In order to get a taste of what this desktop of the future will look like, I’ve spent the last few days using the development version.  Here’s what I’ve found.

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