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GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

Posted Nov 24, 2012 21:57 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode by tytso
Parent article: GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

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

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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.