GNOME Shell

GNOME Shell is intended to be a key part of the new user experience for GNOME 3. It provides many features including the following:

* Launching applications
* Opening files
* Switching between open windows
* Adding and deleting workspaces
* Moving windows between workspaces
* Dynamic system-related information display (including transient notifications)
* Providing a flat list of user-account related actions
* Logging out or switching the session, and stopping or restarting the machine

How to use it

In GNOME, go to System => Preferences => Desktop Effects to enable it

Once GNOME Shell is activated, in the side bar, use the menu to disable it

Individual Components

Clutter - A high level openGL based graphics library and toolkit that is used in a number of places to provide smooth and flicker free animations and transition effects including Moblin, Media Center applications and in GNOME shell as well.

Mutter - A branch of Metacity ( GNOME 2 Window Manager) with support for Clutter

Gjs - GNOME Javascript bindings relying on the engine from Mozilla. A number of GNOME Shell extensions are written in JavaScript using Gjs.