A lesson [LWN.net]

A lesson

Posted Sep 24, 2012 22:59 UTC (Mon) by Jonno (guest, #49613)
In reply to: A lesson by dlang
Parent article: GStreamer 1.0 released

GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 libraries can co-exist (I'm running both a GNOME 2 application and a GNOME 3 application on my KDE desktop right now), though unlike KDE, the GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 desktops can't be co-installed. So GNOME offer the same ability as GStreamer, even if only KDE goes one step further.

As for KDE, I was running KDE 3.5 and 4.x in parallel for a few years, switch between them at login time, so that works just fine (though the K-menu was a bit messy for a while, with duplicates of several applications).

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A lesson

Posted Sep 26, 2012 4:03 UTC (Wed) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (4 responses)

You can install GNOME 3 and MATE (GNOME 2 fork) side by side though. I am typing in MATE now and also have GNOME 3 on this laptop.

A lesson

Posted Sep 26, 2012 4:56 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

Of course it's possible! It's almost always possible with software!

The only case where this can not be achieved is when you don't have a specs for older system and you don't have a source code to dissect it.

The problem is with attitude: the fact that you need to run third-party fork of GNOME2, not some kind of Classic Environment or WoW from the creators of this "shiny new thing" spokes volumes about their priorities and about their attitude WRT their users.

A lesson

Posted Sep 26, 2012 12:25 UTC (Wed) by sebas (guest, #51660) [Link] (1 responses)

GNOME's attitude WRT to their users seems like the most obvious reasons for those forks to have been incepted.

A lesson

Posted Sep 26, 2012 13:47 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

MATE exists because some people are unhappy with Gnome 3 and want to continue Gnome 2 development. Trinity exists because some people are unhappy with KDE 4 and want to continue KDE 3 development. What further conclusions can you draw?

MATE is not GNOME 2

Posted Sep 26, 2012 9:36 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

MATE re-uses the GNOME 2 code, but it is not GNOME 2. In particular, because GNOME didn't care about allowing GNOME 2 to co-exist with GNOME 3, the settings keys for MATE are different to GNOME 2.

If MATE were actually GNOME 2, then switching between GNOME 2 and MATE would be completely transparent. It isn't.