GNOME

GNOME Is a feature-rich desktop. It is one of the most widely-used desktops for Linux. It has been an important part of Gentoo for many years. As of 2011-12-28, The GNOME 2 series is "stable" in Gentoo, and the GNOME 3 series is still marked "unstable." Thus, "emerge gnome" on a stable system installs GNOME 2, while the same command will emerge GNOME 3 if you have "~" in your USE statement in /etc/make.conf.

Because it is so rich, "emerge gnome" requires a long time to complete. It installs a large collection of applications.

See The GNOME Configuration HOWTO for more information on installing and using GNOME.

GNOME 2
The stable Gnome is a 2D desktop with 3D extensions.

GNOME 3
Gnome 3 is considered by many to be a radical departure. It uses 3D graphics capability by default, but will run in a 2D mode if the hardware does not support 3D.