I have found a blog here: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/05/gnome-shell-is-finally-available-in.html that has an interesting article about the Gnome Shell that is now available in the repositories for Ubuntu 11.10. The Gnome Shell is available in Fedora 15, and is arguably better than the bloated and buggy Unity desktop. The screenshot on the page even looks just like Fedora despite the Ubuntu wallpaper. The Gnome 2 desktop option will be removed and the Unity 2D mode will be used instead, even though Gnome 2 is a very stable and usable desktop environment. But hopefully someone will fork() the Gnome 2 code and it will still be available in some form. This picture to the right is my Linux desktop from 2004, with the cool Anime wallpaper and custom AVP Eterm background. Those were the days.
But today the Ubuntu developers just want to copy Mac OS and not just deliver a stable and reliable distribution like the Debian team can, like how difficult is that? I am using Debian Stable now to type this in Firefox 3.5.16 and it all just works without any problems, not to forget that Ubuntu is dumbing down the user interface and making the distribution slower and bloated without any real gains in productivity. But if they want to drive upgrades for more RAM and a faster CPU/GPU then so be it, if that is their goal they are just like Microsoft. I have only 2GB of RAM and my Linux desktop is screaming fast. Windows 7 is slower, but still very usable. I prefer to use Debian though.