# GNOME Shell GNOME Shell provides core user interface functions for the GNOME desktop, like switching to windows and launching applications. GNOME Shell takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware and introduces innovative user interface concepts to provide a visually attractive and easy to use experience. For more information about GNOME Shell, including instructions on how to build GNOME Shell from source and how to get involved with the project, see the [project wiki][project-wiki]. Bugs should be reported to the GNOME [bug tracking system][bug-tracker]. Please refer to the [*Schedule* wiki page][schedule] to see the supported versions. ## Contributing To contribute, open merge requests at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell. Commit messages should follow the [GNOME commit message guidelines](https://wiki.gnome.org/Git/CommitMessages). If a merge request fixes an existing issue, it is good practice to append the full issue URL to each commit message. Try to always prefix commit subjects with a relevant topic, such as `panel:` or `status/network:`, and it's always better to write too much in the commit message body than too little. ## Default branch The default development branch is `main`. If you still have a local checkout under the old name, use: ```sh git checkout master git branch -m master main git fetch git branch --unset-upstream git branch -u origin/main git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD refs/remotes/origin/main ``` ## License GNOME Shell is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. See the [COPYING][license] file for details. [project-wiki]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell [bug-tracker]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues [schedule]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Schedule [license]: COPYING