Install Gnome Shell on Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus

Gnome Shell is the Gnome Desktop Environment user interface which use Mutter as a window manager, going to totally replace its previous model to version 3.0 that it used Gnome Dashboard as user interface already metacity as a window manager.

Accepted by the Linuxera community and hated by many others, has had to talk about these last weeks due to the news that will be the desktop environment to be used in the new version of Ubuntu. If you are one of those (like me) who install Ubuntu 17.04 with Unity as the default environment, then this little guide can help you.

Install Gnome Shell on Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus

Install the graphical environment Gnome on Ubuntu 17.04 is simple, since to install it you just have to execute the following command in a terminal, just ctrl + alt + t to open the terminal and we can write:

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

We just accept the installation and it will start downloading the packages and the environment settings, it will ask us to choose which login manager will be what we have.

In my case, it will ask me if I want to continue conserving lightdm or use GDM.

Now it is enough that we close the current session and in the login menu of the system we choose start with Gnome Shell as environment.

If we want to know what version of Gnome Shell we are on, we open a terminal and type:

gnome-shell –version

In my case it displays the following:

GNOME Shell 3.24.1

Uninstall Gnome Shell from Ubuntu 17.04

If for some reason we no longer want to have Gnome on our system, just remove the Gnome Shell with this command:

sudo apt-get remove gnome-shell ubuntu-gnome-desktop

We must take into account that we need to have a desktop environment installed in addition to Gnome, at the moment of this, since if we do not have to work on a TTY and if we want a graphical environment we will have to install it later.

Install Gnome Shell from PPA on Ubuntu 17.04

The other way to install Gnome Shell is adding the PPA of gnome3-team, To be frank at the moment some packages are not fully updated, so from my point of view the installation that Ubuntu offers us directly is the best, although this is already under their criteria.

In the same way as the previous step, we open the terminal and type:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3-staging
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade

We just have to wait for the packages to be updated and installed, in the same way it will ask us to choose which login manager we want to work on. Once you have chosen and finished installing Gnome Shell, you just have to close the current session and choose Gnome Shell as the environment, in the same way as the previous installation option. If for some reason we no longer want Gnome Shell in our system, we remove it with:

sudo apt install ppa-purge 
sudo ppa-purge ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3-staging