Yesterday I talked to Hamid about AriOS 4 and we are going to start the development shortly. I’ve already collected ideas and feedback I received after releasing 3.0.1. I highlighted a lot of points and organized them as tasks inside a todo list. The list is growing every day and items are added as I come across cool apps and tips and receive more emails.

One question everyone is asking is this: Unity or Gnome Shell? Now I can tell you that we will go for the latter as we find it more usable, more consistent and more productivity-oriented. However, it might not be our default session. I’m considering a custom session (probably based on GNOME Fallback) which resembles AriOS 3, as I think it’s now well-established and quite popular among users in our small community. I’ve received many emails applauding the current setup and desktop layout, so I really love to stick with it and make it better through incremental changes.

However,this highly depends on what will happen to Avant Window Navigator. AWN is the basis of our desktop experience and we, like many users, are worried about its current status. The project appears to be dormant and there are not a lot of updates as there used to be. AWN Testing PPA for Oneiric hasn’t been updated, and the version provided by official Ubuntu repositories does not support the current version of indicator applets.

We’re going to wait a bit more, and I really hope we don’t get disappointed about AWN.  If we do, we will have to consider other alternatives.