[gNewSense-users] gnewsense...gnome desktop will not load

[alsnews]

Hello Fellow gnewers,
                      I am a gnewbie to any linux systems. All I have 
used is windows (BOO!). I agree. I hate all the spyware, and have been 
reading FSF's site, along with some Richard Stallman and Libre Planet 
videos. So, I decided to try out gnewsense, which made gsense to me. 
Anyway, I have an old (5 or 6 yrs) computer running widows 8.1 with an 
AMD 5700 video card,
with 1TB of memory. My wife has more computer knowledge than I. So I got 
her to download gnewsense off of the FSF site. We wanted it installed on 
the hard drive, so we would have
a dual boot system. She allotted (partitioned) 50% of the hard drive for 
gnewsense. Gnewsense downloaded alright, but it wouldn't load the gnome 
desktop, which I really needed to figure out how everthing worked. There 
was an error message that said gnome desktop didn't load because of a 
hardware or graphics problems. My wife then went to AMD's site to get 
the latest driver for or Redeon video card. It seemed to add a few more 
items to our menus list, but we still couldn't load the gnome desktop 
after rebooting. Is it because the AMD driver perhaps came with some 
proprietary software? If so, do any of you know a fix for this? Or a 
work around? I would appreciate any help. If there is no fix, I was 
thinking of trying out Trisquel. Would it make any difference? I know I 
could get a distro like Ubuntu or Debian, and it would probably would 
work fine. But I would prefer to get a GNU/Linux distro. One that's not 
part proprietary software.
Thanks for Your Time,
Have a gGood Day.