It's been a few days since the GNOME 40 Shell was in the Impish Indri "proposal" branch. But if we downloaded the latest Daily Build or we updated the development version of the Canonical operating system, we still did not see the new version that the community is liking so much. Today, who wants to try GNOME 40 In Ubuntu 21.10 you can already do it officially, or at least everything official that can be something that will still take three months to launch its stable version.
From the looks of it, Canonical intends to keep its stamp. As soon as the operating system starts, we will enter what we see in the header capture. Yes, that little icon at the bottom is there, but it was also in Manjaro Unstable. The dock is kept to the left, something that the most purists like but not a server that believes that the interface is asymmetric.
Custom GNOME 40 on Ubuntu 21.10
By far the biggest disappointment in testing GNOME 40 on Manjaro is that not all gestures are available. Project GNOME created its new graphical environment so that sliding three fingers up the activities would appear, and sliding a little more would make the app drawer. From my tests and from some video that I have seen, this does not work in Ubuntu: to enter the activities we have to press the META key, and to enter the app drawer we must click on the icon with the usual 9 squares.
Although, to calm things down a bit, I have to comment that the system information shows "X11". Why is this an important piece of information? Because three finger gestures only work in Wayland and the Daily Live (Session) doesn't allow you to choose that option. Without a team available to install it natively, in fact, the installer gives me an error, we cannot confirm if the gesture will be there or not (we imagine that it is).
UPDATED: After testing by installing the system on a USB with persistent storage, we confirm that the gesture is there.
The rest, dock aside, is there. For example, there is a separate section for open applications where there is also the trash can and in Settings the information about our team appears, but it is not the GNOME 40 as imagined. In three months we will get rid of all doubts, including the one that ensures that they will make the direct jump to GNOME 41.
thanks for the note, we will have to try