It also introduced support for the Wayland display protocol and added integration with other key technologies such as Flatpak during its development lifecycle.

Much of GNOME 3's user interface changes were based-on attempts at simplification and rethinking of traditional desktop computing workflows.

Such extensions allow developers the ability to add modular, separately-versioned customizations to the desktop environment, without having to integrate code directly into the mainline GNOME codebase.

On September 25, 2013, GNOME 3.10 was released, which introduced support for the Wayland display protocol, as the Mutter window manager added experimental compositing.

[2][3][4] As the most-used graphical environment for Linux, this set-up a significant change for distributions to eventually be able to switch from the aging X Window System as a default.

Added to the set of core applications in version 3.10 was GNOME Software, which in concert with AppStream metadata, and the PackageKit daemon, serves as a complete app store and system update utility.

Vincent Untz, part of the release team, noted that designers and developers "tried to forget the current GNOME and see what [they] thought would make sense.

[14] Having shipped GNOME as its default graphical environment on Ubuntu since its debut, Canonical initially collaborated on development, but eventually became disillusioned, and halted their efforts.

[1] Ars Technica called the new GNOME Shell a "good starting point for building something even better", and predicted "backlash from users" who would be upset about missing features.

[19] Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, publicly expressed his dislike of GNOME 3, and called the version 3.4 release a "total user experience design failure.