GNOME Shell or Unity?

So, after my crash and burn with Ubuntu’s Unity, I decided to take a go with GNOME3 and OpenSUSE. My first impressions are that there are in fact very little difference between Unity and GNOME Shell..

Themes and theme engines

There is allot of nice things to say about Mandriva, but very little about their default theme, called la Ora. Even though it comes with several colour variations I find it inherently ugly, and it is always one of the first things I change. This jump was no different and I looked long and hard for a decent theme. In Ubuntu, I always change to Dust, which is a visually pleasing and pretty neutral and darkish theme.  As I have been using that theme for the past few years, I thought this was a good time to start looking for a new one using GNOME-look.org.

Desktop of choice

One of the powers of Linux and the open source movement is the freedom of choice. If the software you need exists in one flavour, it most likely have more flavours out there somewhere. This also comes to desktop environments in Linux. If you are wondering what a desktop environment is, look at your own desktop, and note the file manager, panel with menus, quick launch icons etc. That is your desktop environment.

For a Windows user this concept is quite confusing, as it Windows only comes with one desktop environment, not counting projects like Cairo Desktop Shell. In the Linux world, this is a common term, and everyone have their favorite, from GNOME to XFCE, and even LXDE etc.