Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus arrived a few days ago in all its 'flavors', including Ubuntu GNOME . However, this variant of Canonical's distribution is based on GNOME 3.18, GNOME Shell 3.18, and the GTK 3.18 libraries—among other components with that version number—with the only exceptions being GNOME Software and GNOME Calendar, which are based on GNOME 3.20.
But there's good news: Ubuntu GNOME can now be updated to GNOME 3.20 using the GNOME Staging PPA. This repository typically has the latest versions of all GNOME software , and it's what we'll use for this update, allowing us to start enjoying the new features and benefits of this desktop version right away.
Before starting, it's a good idea to activate the Adwaita theme , which is the default theme for GNOME, to avoid any compatibility issues. Once that's done, you can try out the different themes and see which one you like best.
We add the GNOME 3 Staging repository as follows:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3-staging
Then, as always, you have to update:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt dist-upgrade
After that change, we will have GNOME 3.20 installed on our system, but it would be advisable to restart the computer so that it can be started properly and load all the necessary libraries in an orderly manner.
This is a safe procedure, and it's based on an official repository, so we can use it without any problems. However, it's always possible that the final result won't be entirely to our liking, or that there will be some performance issue that doesn't quite convince us. If that's the case, we can easily reverse these steps to return to GNOME 3.18 if we wish:
sudo apt install ppa-purge sudo ppa-purge ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3-staging