Old style GNOME UI

Am I to take from this comment that the poster, that said Unity on GTK3 would mean no-more classic GNOME in Ubuntu, is incorrect?

I understand that he targets the GNOME developers with his comments because it is the choice of the GNOME project to abandon (or cripple) the classic GNOME interface as an option in GNOME 3 (based on GTK3). Was it just an assumption on his part that Unity moving to GTK3 would also mean the loss of the class interface?

I assume though that the classic interface will continue to be based on GTK2 after Unity moves to GTK3. How long is this likely to remain on option?

That's great news that you will provide gnome 2.x interface access in future releases based on demand. That's actually a really important distinction because other distributions seem to blindly go "gtk3 is out! take out gtk2!" which is where the general unhappiness comes from.

Again, I don't know if I couldn't have made this more clear but my frustration is definitely not with distributions, it is *solely* aimed at the (in my opinion) irresponsible upstream developers for leaving distributions in a crutch (i.e. use gtk3 or use the suddenly abandoned and unsupported yet very stable and feature-rich gtk2).

In fact, that would be great news if you listen to users that are concerned with functionality and not use gtk3 at all when basing your distribution and continue to use gtk2. It might certainly force upstream to provide a real gnome 2.x fallback mode instead of the gimped out 2d gnome-shell fallback. It was puzzling to me when I heard because I'm still wondering how Unity on gtk3 would work with so many basic feature sets missing.

I've tested Unity on some machines and while it works great on netbooks and laptops, it's simply not something that suites my needs due to compositing ruining full screen opengl performance for other applications (unless of course there is a feature coming that disables compositing for full screen applications, be it gpu video decoding or opengl applications).

Gnome developers seem entirely disinterested in using suggestions in gnome-shell which is even further offputting. Instead of listening to user feedback to issue like "why do I have to create another screen for applications?", "why can't I change the font sizes that make my 1920x1080 minitor look like 800x600?", other workflow issues, etc. they seem to be in their own bubble. For the contrary, Unity developers have paid close attention to user feedback: netbook usage especially is great because Unity implemented a really nice vertical screen space saving function of inserting file menu's into the top menu bar.

But unless you can get gtk3/gnome3 devs to wake up and smell their suck (or you fork gtk2/gnome2 or continue to patch and support it which would be awesome), i'm very concerned as to what the gnome-based desktop experience will be years from now.

Will Canonical commit to supporting the full range of GNOME 2.x APIs including the GtkStatusIcon API and associated notification area in the Ubuntu desktop environments which purport to be GNOME 2.x environments in current and future releases?

The discussion on ubuntu-devel list from April seemed to indicate that only certain applications would be whitelisted to be allowed to use the notification area via the GtkStatusIcon. But the discussion does not appear to resolve on the list. I'm assuming the discussion was taken into private Canonical communication channels for resolution.

So I need to ask the following question. Does Gnome Classic mode as implemented in Ubuntu 11.10 allow any application to make use of the notification are...as the original GNOME 2.x design was intended...or only a select few applications manually whitelisted to allowed to use it?

-jef