GNOME Shell 2.91.90 released

Posted Feb 25, 2011 7:01 UTC (Fri) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
In reply to: GNOME Shell 2.91.90 released by russell
Parent article: GNOME Shell 2.91.90 released

I do not feel this is a 'show us the code' comment at all. The key word for me in the original comment is 'modular'.

Unity is essentially a competing GNOME environment that, although providing a completely different user experience, shares the majority of it's ecosystem with GNOME 3.

XFCE is also a GTK+ based environment as is LXDE I believe. You can use these for the desktop experience if you like and still enjoy pretty much everything that GNOME has to offer and it will still feel pretty native.

In fact, I believe that one of the environments competing with GNOME Shell will be updated versions of Metacity and the GNOME panels. You can run the exact desktop you are used to now with GNOME 2 but with upgraded GTK+ and a lot more.

Beyond all that there are many different Window Managers and other environments. There is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to how you want to consume the parts of GNOME that you do find useful.

Demanding that we want to be able to configure and then wining that we would have to configure something to get back the behaviour we want seems silly. "I am a POWER USER dammit so you should design the system exactly as I like right out of the box!"

Pretending that GNOME is as restrictive and prescriptive as something like OS X or even Windows is misleading to my mind. I can run GNOME platform features and GNOME applications a lot of different ways without writing a line of code. I can also write a bunch of complimentary code pretty easily if I like. Thanks GNOME team.

I may or may not like the GNOME Shell. I will probably give it a try. I have not loved Unity based on the little I have tried it. I will probably run GNOME in a 'classic' configuration because, as with others here, that is what I am personally used to and feel productive with. What I will not do is to throw a tantrum because the GNOME developers feel the desktop can be done better and are trying to give it a shot.

After all, as far as I can tell, the GNOME team is explicitly providing the option to stay with the old metaphor if that is what you prefer.

I believe this is what the original poster was getting at.