April 2011 saw a change in Ubuntu where it launched Unity instead of Gnome as its default desktop environment. That did not went down well with many users who wanted to use the newly launched Gnome 3 in Ubuntu. Ubuntu 11.04 did not provide support to Gnome 3 officially. Enthusiast users did find a way to install Gnome 3 though but it resulted in breaking the Unity environment completely which means that a user could have used either Unity or Gnome 3 not both.

Fortunately Ubuntu 11.10 (released in October 2011) does support Gnome 3 officially. Though the default desktop environment is still Unity you can still install Gnome 3. Follow these simple steps:

• Open the terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T)
• Type the following command:

  sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

• Logout or Shut down and log back in
• Now while on the Login Screen select GNOME for Gnome 3, Gnome Classic for Classic Gnome
• Once you are logged in into Gnome 3, you should have a desktop like this:

Hope it helped you. Questions and suggestions are welcome. Don’t forget to subscribe to keep updated.