Fedora was the first major Linux distribution to ship the GNOME 3 desktop.
Fedora 15, released in May 2011, adopted GNOME 3.0 and its new GNOME Shell as the default desktop experience. GNOME 3 represented the project's biggest interface change in years, replacing the traditional GNOME 2 panel layout with an Activities overview, a top bar, workspaces, and a different approach to launching and switching between applications.
The distinction between “first to ship” and “first to support” matters. Other distributions made GNOME 3 packages or preview builds available, but Fedora 15 is generally credited as the first major distribution to include it as a standard desktop. openSUSE followed with version 12.1 in November 2011, shipping GNOME 3.2. Debian and Ubuntu also offered GNOME components, but Ubuntu used Unity as its default desktop at the time.
The transition prompted the creation or growth of alternatives such as MATE and Cinnamon, which preserved more familiar GNOME 2-style workflows.