The biggest change that will probably come with Gnome 3.0 is the abandoning of the traditional desktop system. Gone will be the Start-button-style arrangement that was borrowed from Windows 95 (or at least inspired by it). Instead, it's looking likely will form the chief user-interface component. This is a kind of desktop-on-a-desktop system. It's a little hard to explain how it works and the best thing you can do is go and look at some of it in action. It's too early for it to be found in the Ubuntu repositories, but you can download the code and build it yourself. The devs have made it really easy to do so, especially if you're running a mainstream distro like Ubuntu. See the Building heading on the main project page.

In practical terms, Gnome Shell marks a significant departure from the way desktop Linux has operated up until now. But Gnome Shell also marks a departure in another significant way. To understand why we have to acknowledge an elephant in the room, which is this: open source tends to follow paths created by proprietary software.

This is a controversial statement, I know, and there are several prominent examples in the open source world that contradict it. The Apache web server, for example, made the world wide web possible, and came about before any proprietary software company even had a clue what the Web was.

However, in other key ways, the maxim is hard to deny. The granddaddy of all open source projects, GNU, was initially a . was inspired partly by Windows 95. OpenOffice.org was inspired by Microsoft Office, and Evolution by Microsoft Outlook. Could we have had the Amarok or RhythmBox music players without iTunes coming first? This list goes on and on.