GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode [LWN.net]

GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

Posted Nov 24, 2012 19:35 UTC (Sat) by tytso (subscriber, #9993)
In reply to: GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode by jbicha
Parent article: GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

Well, let's wait a few releases to see what other features (including perhaps static 2D workspaces, or other things which I depend upon) either disappear capriciously, or fail because extensions are considered 2nd class citizens that can break at any time when changes to GNOME's "core vision" are made.

The problem is that the GNOME developers have a very bad reputation about not caring about preserving their existing userbase's usage patterns, and instead of developed Steve Jobs arrogance of trying to tell me that "I'm using it wrong". I haven't seen any evidence they've repented of their arrogance. Until then, why should I risk my productivity?

Better to try to encourage more people to use the competition such as XFCE, and make it be a better desktop environment than GNOME 2.x ever was (and certainly better than GNOME 3.x is by my lights).

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GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

Posted Nov 24, 2012 21:57 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Out of curiosity, why encourage people to go with XFCE for their GNOME 2 needs, rather than MATE - which actually is GNOME 2?

GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

Posted Nov 24, 2012 22:13 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

XFCE probably has a better future, as MATE is clearly based on legacy codebase. MATE upgraded to use GTK3 is called "Cinnamon".

XFCE, on the other hand, is not married to GTK2 - there are plans to migrate to GTK3 (it's actually slowly happening right now). And XFCE community is nice enough to minimize breaking UI changes.

GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

Posted Nov 26, 2012 17:07 UTC (Mon) by tytso (subscriber, #9993) [Link]

From what I can tell the development community for MATE is quite small, certainly compared to XFCE's. I don't have as a good of a sense of the number of developers working on Cinnamon. Can anyone comment how the viability of the Gnome 2 forks in general as far as development community?

But in any case, that's why I've been recommending XFCE; that and the fact that it's available on all of the major distributions, which is not necessarily true for the Gnome 2 forks.