systemd comparison with GNOME 3 is slightly unfair

Why not? There was nothing bad with that language. I made some suggestions that would have a rather large impact on the UX and the codebase and the powers that be said it would be too much work for changes they didn't believe were desirable by the users of the project. It was a reasonable response. One I disagreed with, but not one that gave me any reason to be upset. I'm now just a little amused by it, not angry, because it's ironic in hindsight. :) Believe me, simplifying the panel is my favorite part of GNOME Shell. I just now believe (very, very strongly) that it has been grossly over-simplified to the point of uselessness.

Maybe GNOME today is all about spending time debating and considering every major change that every person ever suggests... but it shouldn't be.

> Just four days ago you claimed that you were an XFCE user. And nary three months ago you claimed you were forking gnome-panel after which two GNOME developers bent over backwards to kindly offer you a git account to continue to do so.

Turns out that some people do own more than one computer, and do dual-boot or use VMs. Crazy, right? :)

In my case, I have a laptop that exclusively runs Windows 7, and is what I use the vast majority of the time. My main desktop at home is dual-boot between Windows 7 and Fedora+XFCE (after I gave up on GNOME). For work, I use Windows 7, and XP when I have to.

I use Linux at times still as I maintain some Fedora packages, like to occasionally use Valgrind on some other code I maintain, and I like to tinker with things (the systemd stuff is really cool and I'm enjoying that, and the Mesa+Gallium work is awesome if slow-going at times). This remaining Linux install will transition to a VM as soon as it becomes possible to run OpenGL 3.2+ dependent code on Linux without requiring Catalyst or the NVIDIA drivers (which don't run in a VM). If I get a Mac, which I'm debating, I may not even bother with the Linux install anymore, and I'll pretty much only ever use Linux as a server from then on. We'll see. Again, that'll be a massive change for me, as I've been a desktop Linux user (exclusively, save for a very brief foray into OS X with a Macbook G4 I ended up not liking) from 1999 until 2009.

> Metacity and Mutter share about 95% of their code. Mutter is a fork; it is not a rewrite. GNOME Panel could not be modified to use a scene graph.

It rewrote parts of it, namely the compositor. Instead of taking Metacity and architecting the compositor bit to support no compositor, RENDER compsoiting, and GL compositing, the old compositor was just left to rot in Metacity and rewritten to use Clutter in Mutter. So now we have on GNOME the choice of a GL-only compositor or a 1990's desktop experience. (I filed bugs on Metacity's compositor, they were closed as WONTFIX.)

And of course the plugin system was not added to Metacity. So even though the new shell does absolutely nothing in any way that requires GL, you can only get the shell experience on Mutter, because the plugins for the overview modes only works in Mutter. So again you're stuck with maintaining gnome-panel despite opting to rewrite it from scratch solely because of some really bad architecture decisions. At risk of starting a completely different flamewar: KDE got this right, why didn't GNOME?

The gnome-shell was a rewritten panel. It doesn't do anything the gnome-panel doesn't save for some very simplistic overview layouts (which certainly are doable in Cairo). It does quite a bit less, in fact. What exactly did it need this rewrite for? Why does there need to be a whole new toolkit that looks (and occasionally behaves) differently than GTK, and is that justification for the duplication of code and extra maintenance required? If the sole desire was for some smooth transitions and such in the menus, why not bring GTK into the 21st century and add support for it there? I'm sure regular applications would love to have a more modern and pretty toolkit, too, without needing to rewrite from scratch for Clutter+JavaScript.

I'm not sure why I keep asking these questions. This must be the 20th time, and I never get an answer that has any kind of actual technical justification to it of any kind. At best I get links to old half-thought-out mailing list posts that can be summed up as "it would be _cool_ to do this instead, so let's do it!" Ah, FOSS.

> No, not really. [1] [2] [3]

Yes, it's amazing how much I dislike the project now after it proved how its new frontmen deal with people who dare to voice complaint. I don't start out angry and venomous, but it turns out I'm kind of a jerk when people insult me. Guess I'm not a big enough man to just turn the other cheek.

> You have me confused with someone else.

Unless someone else was posting with your full name, I don't think I do. This was some time ago, last summer I believe.