First Look at GNOME 3.10 on Arch Linux

After approximately two weeks of testing, the Arch Linux developers promoted earlier today, October 7, the recent GNOME 3.10 desktop environment to the stable channels, allowing users to upgrade their six-month-old GNOME 3.8 installation.

I am one of those users, and I am extremely happy to get a pure GNOME 3.10 experience on my Arch Linux machine. I'm also proud to say that the desktop environment runs very well, and looks good, just as expected.

I want to remind everyone that the GNOME 3.10 desktop environment has been officially announced by the GNOME Project on September 25, 2013, and that it introduces several new applications that I'm excited to test these days.

If you're using Arch Linux and GNOME as your main desktop environment, then you can upgrade your GNOME installation to version 3.10 right now, using the sudo pacman -Syu command in a terminal. Don't forget to restart your computer for the changes to be applied.

This is also one of the biggest updates I've done since I use the Arch Linux operating system, with a total download size of approximately 300 MiB and a total installed size of 1.1 GB.

As you can see from the screenshot above, and as expected from our previous reports about the new features and functionality included in the GNOME 3.10 desktop environment, I can tell you that it runs and feels very good.

After I've restarted my machine, I've quickly noticed a new effect for the login manager, as well as the new unified system status area (which looks amazing and it's very handy), and a new wheel-like button next to the Login button, from where you can change the desktop environment if you have more than one.

I have to admit that after the desktop has been loaded, I was a little disappointed as my installed GNOME extensions were not working, which I use to beautify the GNOME desktop environment. At first, I thought that they were disabled by the upgrade process, but after a little bit of research I've realized that none of them was compatible with GNOME 3.10.

Therefore, I've pointed my Firefox web browser to the GNOME Extensions website, where I was able to upgrade some of them (the most important ones) and beautify my GNOME 3.10 desktop with third-party themes.

As for the new applications brought by GNOME 3.10, none of them was installed with the upgrade. I had to manually install them from the default Arch Linux software repository. Unfortunately, the GNOME Software application does not exist. Maybe it will be added in the next days.

Another interesting thing I've noticed is that I have a new "Open Terminal" function when I right click on the desktop, which really comes in handy if you work a lot with the Terminal app like I do.

How's your GNOME 3.10 experience so far?

First Look at GNOME 3.10 on Arch Linux

Arch Linux users who use GNOME 3.8 can upgrade to GNOME 3.10