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I'm not sure if anyone would have the answer to this, but it seems a little odd to me that Ubuntu doesn't package the latest stable version of gdm considering gnome-shell version 3.4 was packaged in the precise release.

I know it's not a massive question, but I'm intrigued to know why this hasn't been included in the repos. I would imagine that some people want to full gnome experience and ubuntu just isn't giving it to them.

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1 Answer 1

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gdm 3.0 is the latest version included in 12.04/repos because at the time of the UIFreeze/BetaFreeze, on Feb 23, 2012, no newer version was ready -- "gdm requires a lot of patching to work on Debian/Ubuntu."

See this blog post from Jeremy Bicha, Ubuntu's gnome-desktop maintainer (among other things) for the reasoning behind what bits and pieces of Gnome 3.4 made it into Precise and why (or why not).

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That's a great answer, thank you very much. I didn't realise how much configuring was needed to get everything running in ubuntu. I'm tempted to join the ubuntu-desktop team though to test some of the apps. –  SuperMatt Jul 10 '12 at 16:40
@SuperMatt You're welcome! tista has a GDM 3.4 PPA, but it didn't work on Precise for me. Joining ubuntu-desktop isn't easy :( (well, unless you're already a Debian dev/maintainer for some component ;) –  izx Jul 10 '12 at 16:46

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