When GNOME switched to the 3rd version, initially it was plagued with a whole lot of controversies. Ubuntu came up with Unity DE and gave up pure GNOME 3 momentarily to again be back with a GNOME 3 spin in the Raring Ringtail release. There was no LTS release earlier but this time the Ubuntu GNOME team is gearing up for the 14.04 LTS release. I guess that is a great news for all GNOME lovers.