Fallback mode [LWN.net]

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:09 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by GhePeU
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

"Rendered unusable" is not an accurate way of putting it. There are some sad developments, like the loss of panel applets, but fallback mode as a whole works pretty well.

to post comments

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:16 UTC (Wed) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link] (12 responses)

It seems to me that "rendered unusable" is a perfect description. It's not only the applets, it's everything.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643951

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:21 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (8 responses)

OK, I can see that if you like Nautilus, you'd be unhappy. I have yet to find a use for that particular tool, so I kind of didn't even notice that particular change...

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:44 UTC (Wed) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link]

I don't particularly like Nautilus, I've got at most a couple of directories and a few symlinks on my ~/Desktop because I use it mostly as a transient area, so that alone wouldn't be a great deal.

The thing is that the "classic" or "fallback" mode has been advertised as a way to keep using a mostly traditional GNOME 2 desktop; see jmalcolm's comment I originally responded to.

Well, it's not that. Icons on desktop, themes, font selection, panel applets, the fallback mode lost all the things that were stripped from GNOME 3, and also a lot of things that were a big part of the GNOME 2.

I suppose that somebody realized that if the users could choose between a fully working GNOME 2 and the shell most of them would have preferred the former, so something had to be done...

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 17, 2011 3:29 UTC (Thu) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (6 responses)

Nautilus is actually surprisingly useful for quick network mount stuff where you don't want to go to the hassle of setting up fuse, nfs, or whatever, or when finding music files, and so on. It actually is a very nice piece of software these days. It took about 10 years for me to actually use it, because I was always convinced that "real" computer users (i.e. old school UNIX) wouldn't be seen dead doing anything other than on a command line. Maybe, in ten more years, I'll come around to the idea of using 3D for anything other than academia, number crunching, or pretty games.

Of course, nautilus is gone too now. Which is so sad. After about ten years, after it reaches the point of being "just works" software for me...now it's back to 5 years ago with Thunar - a great project, but it'll need time to catch up. And, of course, we'll rinse and repeat this in a few more years.

Jon.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 17, 2011 9:22 UTC (Thu) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link] (2 responses)

Nautilus usable ? Even on SSD and all the previews disabled it still takes ages to list a large directory.

I'm fairly certain there is an architectual mistake in Nautilus which is never gonna get fixed so it will never be faster listing 'large' directories.

I just checked, it takes 7 seconds to open a directory with 318 items every time you go to that directory. There is no caching or anything like that ? Really 7 seconds ? That makes no sense to me.

Nautilus just makes me sad to think that it would be the best/most advanced.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 18, 2011 7:28 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (1 responses)

> Nautilus usable ? Even on SSD and all the previews disabled it still takes
> ages to list a large directory.

Just use thunar. It lists directories with thousands of entries pretty quickly. It also caches previews of media files, etc.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 18, 2011 8:55 UTC (Fri) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

I know Thunar, I'm just surprised Nautilus is still being used in GNOME and default on so many Linux distributions.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 17, 2011 13:08 UTC (Thu) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link] (2 responses)

Nautilus is still present in both Gnome Shell and fallback mode. Just launch it. Do you mean that by default Nautilus does not handle the background?

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 17, 2011 17:28 UTC (Thu) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link] (1 responses)

We no longer show screenshots over the background, no.

(I say this jokingly because gnome-screenshot is the only app I know of that explicitly saved things to ~/Desktop; since browsers moved downloads to ~/Downloads...)

You can access the "Computer" and Trash from the Files app.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 22, 2011 22:01 UTC (Tue) by bluss (guest, #47454) [Link]

Ah but, you can configure applications to save documents there. Or as I do, put them there when asked for each download.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 17, 2011 4:41 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (1 responses)

Ok, I have to step back a bit.

If "fallback mode" is to be so different from GNOME 2 then it is not as simple as I have said it was. I was completely unaware of the plan to remove desktop icons from Nautilus.

There are of course other GTK+ apps that can serve as drop-in replacements. Still, the more you have to beg and borrow the less GNOME the desktop becomes. This is is not the crisis that some people declare it to be but it is more disruptive than I understood it to be.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 18, 2011 13:02 UTC (Fri) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link]

It is just disabled by default. You can enable icons on the desktop through gconf.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:25 UTC (Thu) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link]

I'm sure you can enable it. You used to be able to disable it in gnome2. (gconf)

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:30 UTC (Thu) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link]

There is a legitimate technical reason for applets not working straight away in gnome-panel.

Corba has finally been removed and applets used that and required linking to corba from gnome-panel. It should be entirely possible to run those applets out of process though, they used to in old old gnome 2.X's (still corba), but having seperate process a waste of memory.