No, gnome-shell does the same as Unity. It will run in 3D but falls back to running on llvmpipe (i.e. software rendering) when accelerated graphics is not detected. Other than how slow it is, it is hard to tell the difference.loukingjr wrote: That might be the case if I even had Unity installed. What the screenshots show is Gnome Remix which is gnome-shell only. If it had to drop to 2D it would show so called Gnome Classic and would show "Applications Places" in the top panel. I'm kind of familiar with the point of the thread seeing I started it.
Run the following to see if you are using VB accelerated graphics, or llvmpipe:
apt-get install mesa-utils
glxinfo | grep renderer
If you see llvmpipe, or software rasterizer, etc in that output then you are not using VB accelerated (3D) graphics.