That such.
A few hours ago I posted about GNOME Shell and its future , and a reader brought up something I think is important to consider: What is a shell?
By definition, in computing, the term "shell" refers to programs that provide a user interface for accessing operating system services. These can be graphical or text-based, depending on the type of interface they use. Shells are designed to simplify how different programs available on the computer are invoked or executed.
It should be noted that there are 2 types of Shell and these are:
Common text shells such as bash, emacs, Windows command prompt, among others.
Common graphical shells such as GNome, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Unity, MacOS Desktop Environment, Windows Desktop, among others.
So we can summarize that the Shell is in a few words the desktop environment (DE) or Windows Manager (WM) that we use to work on our PC's, regardless of the distribution that we use either through GUI's (graphical environments) or by the terminal regarding the interaction we require to be able to use the services and applications offered by the operating systems.
This same definition can then be applied to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, whether with Android, iOS or Windows Phone; since the latter are operating systems with a preconfigured DE or WM.
So, KDE is a Shell, XFCE is a Shell, LXDE is a Shell, iOS is a Shell, Android is a Shell, Windows Phone is a Shell, the terminal is a shell (via bash), so what can we say about GNOME 3 is regarding its interface and appearance nothing else. That the change was radical: YES.
KDE and / or members of the community experiment with an environment with a philosophy "similar" (not to say the same) as the one used by the Gnome project today, since by definition KDE can also be called the KDE Shell.
For all that is explained in the previous paragraphs, I can venture to say that GNOME 3 (Shell) has a future that some people like or others dislike.
NOTE: The definition and types of shell were taken from Wikipedia, the link is this.