Ubuntu 10.10 won't use GNOME Shell by default

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, answered a number of questions during an IRC conference with the Ubuntu community. This event was held in the framework of Ubuntu Open Week. The first question was about the possibility of using GNOME Shell as the default shell for the Ubuntu 10.10 distribution (Maverick Meerkat).

Here is Mark's answer:

under the current release plan, Gnome Shell will not be part of the Maverick distribution, but its packages will be available from the universe repositories

Thus, although GNOME Shell using Mutter will be available in the Ubuntu Maverick repository (just as it is now available in the 9.10 Karmic and 10.04 Lucid repositories), it will not be used by default until at least Ubuntu 11.04. This will give developers time to improve product stability, X.Org/Mesa developers will be able to improve the graphics stack, and the LLVMpipe driver will be better adapted for GNOME Shell to work without 3D / OpenGL hardware acceleration.

In addition, during an almost hour-long conference, questions were asked about the default browser in Ubuntu 10.10, whether mixing money in open-source communities to volunteers would hurt, and what makes Ubuntu most impressive today. For those that missed this conference, the full list of questions and answers can be found on the Ubuntu Wiki .