GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode [LWN.net]

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 11:32 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode by drago01
Parent article: GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

From that link:

"In addition to these issues, some people would like to improve components of the fallback mode to work differently -- but in a way that would make the fallback mode work more like GNOME 2, and diverge from the GNOME 3 vision. Those contributions are usually blocked because the goal of the fallback mode is to work the GNOME 3 way."

Note that one of the earlier reasons is that fallback mode wasn't being maintained, but from that paragraph it's clear that those who care enough to work on fallback mode have their contributions blocked because of "the GNOME 3 vision".

It's bizarre that you dismiss comments that were formed by effectively summating public statements from GNOME devs as conspiracy theories, and give links that contain material which actually is consistent with the point you intended to refute.

to post comments

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 12:50 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link] (29 responses)

Gnome (the project) has a vision of a consistent environment, so they don't accept patches that go against that overall design. Very rightly so. If somebody doesn't like Gnome 3, they are free to use another desktop environment. Nobody is forced to use Gnome 3, and nobody should feel entitled to dictate their overall view on the Gnome project. At least not without being actively involved in said decision process, and definitely not by whining in public. If you like Gnome 2 so much, go contribute to the projects which work on grafting the Gnome 2 UI onto Gnome3 infrastructure. "Code talks, BS walks," as they say.

BTW, I do remember all the screaming and shouting about the oh so bad, unusuable, klunky new Gnome 2, with hordes threatening to abandon Gnome, or keeping Gnome 1 alive forever. After a few releases of Gnome 2, the loud complainers were silently using Gnome 2... and AFAICS the very same thing is happening right now, again.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 12:59 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

I actually fully agree with you. The GNOME developers are quite free to pursue their vision (at least, the employer of most of them doesn't accept money for GNOME 3 support/influence to date). I was replying to someone who seemed to suggest it was a conspiracy theory to suggest fallback mode removal was motivated by the GNOME 3 one true way.

That's not to suggest they're not entitled to do that.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 14:03 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (18 responses)

After a few releases of Gnome 2, the loud complainers were silently using Gnome 2... and AFAICS the very same thing is happening right now, again.

Maybe. I think there are a number of ways this is playing out:

Some people like GNOME 3. For them, it's a win.
Some technically-savvy people dislike GNOME 3 and are able to switch to XFCE, KDE, or whatever. I'm in this camp.
Some technically-naive people dislike GNOME 3, but grumble and adjust to it. These people are in the same position as Windows users, I guess.
Some technically-naive people think that "Linux" developers are idiots and jump ship for Windows or Mac OS X. And this, I think, is the greatest danger of GNOME 3 (and to some extent KDE 4): Drastic UI changes that bewilder people and turn them off the "Linux" desktop and on to proprietary OSes. (Never mind that Microsoft is making the same sort of mistakes with Windows 8 ... MSFT users can't even imagine something called "choice", so MSFT has a lock on them.)

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 14:42 UTC (Fri) by alexl (guest, #19068) [Link] (8 responses)

Why would a switch to Windows/Mac be any different for the last type?
Its not like they then have control over what happens to their desktop.
OS X keeps changing, and Windows 8 is hardly the same as Windows 7.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 16:05 UTC (Fri) by fb (guest, #53265) [Link]

> Why would a switch to Windows/Mac be any different for the last type?
> Its not like they then have control over what happens to their desktop.
> OS X keeps changing, and Windows 8 is hardly the same as Windows 7.

I would argue that while all these desktops change, the rate of changes is (IMO) a lot higher in Linux.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 17:07 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (5 responses)

Why would a switch to Windows/Mac be any different for the last type?

It wouldn't. But two things: (1) there's a perception that proprietary vendors are somehow more "professional" or do more in-depth UI research than FOSS vendors, and (2) once people do switch to a proprietary system, they're locked in and it's extremely hard to get them back into the free software community.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 19:11 UTC (Fri) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (4 responses)

It's so easy to believe the grass is greener on the other side... That if some company makes billions with their software it must be really good and immune to the goofs that the stuff we hack together ourselves suffers from.

Only... I got a nice new Lenovo T430 with Win7 pro, 64 bit. I was a good boy and I created restore media. Well done! Then I plopped the disk from my old laptop in the second bay and started dual booting.

All was well -- except that Windows 7 couldn't install the majority of its crucial system updates because it couldn't install them over locked files. But every reboot iteration helped a little there, and I got it up to date.

Then, after two weeks of heavy software development under Windows, I booted the laptop one morning to find it felt it had to check the disk. And yes, the night before I had performed a clean shutdown. And it felt it to repair stuff.

So I let it repair stuff. Turns out that the wifi and "internet time" services got damages. Zut... Let's try that restore media. Zut... It doesn't want to restore: indeed, restore silently fails. Wonderful. Still, deadlines are deadlines, so now laptop is tethered to its cable when doing Windows stuff.

The grass is not greener on the OSX side, either, where a regular OS update made my Mac Mini unbootable. Fortunately, that still came with OS dvd's, so I could reinstall, which is impossible with the Win7 partition on the T430.

Software sucks, hardware sucks, prices are doubling, pleasures are dwindling and nothing is as it should be!

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 13, 2012 13:04 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (3 responses)

Wow, so Windows isn't completely immune to problems when your hardware fails?

Well it's a good think Linux runs tickety-boo when your disk starts returning bad data.

(PS:
>All was well -- except that Windows 7 couldn't install the majority of its crucial system updates because it couldn't install them over locked files. But every reboot iteration helped a little there, and I got it up to date.

I imagine many people here don't have direct recent experience of Windows Update; suffice it to say that the above is a major exaggeration. Windows does indeed still have the crazy file locking semantics and has no equivalent to ksplice, so some updates will still require a reboot, but this talk of 'reboot cycles' is a tired old canard. The only Linux distribution I have recent 'desktop' experience of is Ubuntu, and that pops up 'reboot required' reminders somewhat more often than Windows does.)

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 13, 2012 13:31 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (2 responses)

No, my hardware didn't fail Windows failed. The disk wasn't actually broken, Windows 7 was broken.

And no, Nye, I did not lie about the windows update problems. I did not exaggerate, let alone majorly.

It was exactly as I described. On starting the laptop after unboxing, the update center informed me that it needed to install a few dozen updates, and I said Ok. Then it informed me that it needed to reboot, and I said Ok. Then it tried to apply the updates, failed, and on showing the desktop told me it had crucial updates to apply I said Ok, and it asked me to reboot, and I said Ok -- rinse and repeat until Windows was satisfied.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 15, 2012 19:24 UTC (Thu) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

I use Windows a lot and can confirm that Windows Update works like this - sometimes I will find an update fails, and can only be applied by requesting the update on a freshly booted system (sometimes in Safe Mode), and then rebooting again.

OS X (10.7 Lion) is pretty painful for me at the moment because my Macbook Air WiFi goes mad man times a day - usually turning WiFi on and off, or rebooting, or power cycling the WAP, will fix it. I resorted to installing a driver from previous OS X version just to improve the WiFi. Ultimately I think it's that OS X doesn't like working with my Asus WAP (RT-N10), which works fine with a couple of iOS devices, some Windows laptops, etc. There's a 150 page thread on the Apple forums about this WiFi issue with Lion.

Ironically enough, I got this WAP because of an iPad 3 having WiFi problems with a WRT54G running Tomato.

Macs are quite nice in some ways as a reasonably sane Unix environment that also has nice software you can buy if you want, plus a lot of open source software - but in my experience the Apple WiFi support is truly awful. I suspect Apple only tests with their own Airport WAPs.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 15, 2012 19:27 UTC (Thu) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

On 'the disk didn't fail' - I recently found Windows had 'deleted' the hal.dll file required for boot. I replace the hal.dll but it got removed again. It turned out to be that the disk was failing silently, without visible read errors in the logs - I replaced it with an SSD and it's been fine since. So in this case it was a disk failure, but on the surface it looked like a Windows failure.

If you are having unexplained file corruption, it could be a RAM error as well, of course.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 12, 2012 17:18 UTC (Mon) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

Windows 8 may be a large UI change. But look at the history. The Windows UI has remained essentially the same since Windows 95. That's nearly 20 years.

Mac OS X was a large change from OS 9 but since then its desktop has remained pretty much the same. It has added a few features and changed a few minor things but I could be just as comfortable using OS 10.3 as 10.7. (10.0, .1 and .2 were a bit too clunky).

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 15:06 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (2 responses)

I thing you're partially right, but I think the trouble is more lack of capability than drastic UI changes. If your environment makes hard simple tasks like shutting down your machine, you're not going to like it much.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 24, 2012 7:21 UTC (Sat) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link] (1 responses)

After over 20 years of using computers - including Windows 3.1 to 98 and 2000 to 7, for a total of literally THOUSANDS of hours, likely in excess of 10k, just in Windows - and having no trouble in adjusting to any of these (or six Linux desktops/WMs for that matter) I installed Windows 8 earlier. I had to ask a friend who had already tried Win8 on how to shut down (click on username -> log out -> wait -> click again -> click on shutdown -> wait more). Is this the sort of thing you mean? ;)

PS: Well, "no trouble" may be exaggerated, but I certainly managed to complete what should be trivial tasks like shutting down without assistance.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 24, 2012 9:01 UTC (Sat) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Or just do what you did all those twenty years: press ctrl-alt-del and take it from there..

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 15:20 UTC (Fri) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

There's also a set of technically-advanced users that tolerate GNOME 3 because they have bigger fish to fry / no time to try something else. No doubt other sets too. And we haven't even begun to speculate as to the relative sizes of these sets...

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 20:12 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

It would be really nice to get some accurate statistics on this. At the moment, it is pure guesswork. I do think there is a relation towards the comments on forums (etc) and usage, but difficult to estimate how much.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 22:32 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link] (3 responses)

Your second point (again, just like in Gnome 1 --> 2) should read "Some technically-savvy people dislike GNOME 3 and are able to switch to XFCE, KDE, or whatever. I'm in this camp, complain loudly on LWN and $ELSEWHERE, and will quietly switch back to Gnome once I get bored with $REPLACEMENT." (Yes, Linus famously decreed Gnome 2 was useless junk when it came out. Now he complains Gnome 3 is different...).

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 10, 2012 0:09 UTC (Sat) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]

... and recently returned to Gnome Shell
http://bambuser.com/v/3084584

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 10, 2012 1:48 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

and will quietly switch back to Gnome once I get bored with $REPLACEMENT

Very unlikely. I've been a dedicated XFCE user for many years and see no reason to abandon it.

I'm not complaining about GNOME 3 for my own sake... I don't use it. However, it's going to be wrenching for my users (I'll probably switch them to XFCE instead) and I believe it will drive quite a few people away from Linux altogether.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 22, 2012 16:30 UTC (Thu) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link]

Also, the sky is falling.

The loud complainers

Posted Nov 9, 2012 14:19 UTC (Fri) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (6 responses)

I'm one of the (not-so) loud complainers during the 1 -> 2 transition.

I'm using FVWM now.

At that time I went for GNOME mainly for two reasons: QT licensing issues and the promise of less bloat. Ironically, the GNOME of today is even more bloated than KDE, which is quite a feat.

(This isn't intended as offense: I do realize that one person's bloat are the other person's features, and I wouldn't dare to force anyone not to use GNOME, as much as I woldn't like to be forced to use GNOME -- or dbus or whatever).

The feature creep (why has the desktop environment to take over the "mounting" of devices? That' the job of the OS, I thought?) downright scares me.

(I do agree on your other points).

The loud complainers

Posted Nov 9, 2012 15:42 UTC (Fri) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link] (5 responses)

Not necessarily advocating for it, but mounting stuff isn't always as simple as mount(8). The gnome-mount manpage (which is actually obsolete and has been replaced with something else, but the use-cases are still relevant) reads:

"Mounting a file system into the root file system involves a certain degree of configuration and as such is subject to whatever preferences an user might have. gnome-mount allows the user to control the mount point location, the mount options and what file system to use for mounting a file system. The settings are read from the gconf database (which is per-user) and can also be overridden on the command line using the appropriate parameters."

If you accept that mounting a volume can (a) have user-specific preferences and (b) have specific permissions, then something has to talk to the user session to make those determinations. And a root process reading user settings usually runs afoul of security policy, hence the user-session mounting utilities.

The loud complainers

Posted Nov 9, 2012 22:10 UTC (Fri) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (4 responses)

"[...] mounting stuff isn't always as simple as mount(8) [...]"

Most definitely, totally agree. But then, it's a problem to be fixed at the system level, and to try to provide a dektop-independent interface for desktop environments to hook-in -- instead of kludging it at the desktop level.

For one data point, I just finished "fixing" the Gnome metadata of one user: the emblems and comments disappeared just because this user's harddisk changed and the metadata are tucked away in some obscure database in the home directory... tied to the disk's UUID. Eek!

Look, I do understand that the desktop folks want to get things done, but this stacking up of leaky abstraction on top of leaky abstraction just scares me. I prefer to stay clear of that and to think of better alternatives -- if there are any. That's all.

The loud complainers

Posted Nov 9, 2012 22:41 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (3 responses)

There is a desktop-independent interface for desktop environments to hook into: udisks.

The loud complainers

Posted Nov 10, 2012 0:08 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Yep! And coredump bugs in this software running as root have gone unfixed for years (I know, because I sent the patches, repeatedly: no response whatsoever, like throwing meringues into a black hole. Perhaps udisks2 has fixed it -- perhaps udisks2 was the reason coredump bugs in udisks1 were ignored -- but udisks2 was years from release when I first sent the first of these patches).

These days I don't even bother trying to report bugs in udisks. The maintainer just doesn't care.

Sorry, this is not good maintenance.

The loud complainers

Posted Nov 12, 2012 17:30 UTC (Mon) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

udisks and upower: these things appear to be very unloved. Someone must have written them and tossed them over the wall then forgotten they exist.

upower is a critical system daemon these days because Gnome won't suspend the laptop on lid close without it. But of course, any tiny difference in sysfs configuration and it dies. It either crashes or does a g_error log and exit. Now who thought doing abort in a power management daemon was a good idea?

This has caused me to have a drained laptop at least three times.

udisks

Posted Nov 11, 2012 15:33 UTC (Sun) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]

Thanks for the pointer. Unfortunately, it's dbus -- so not for me... (the general approach is in the rivht direction, though).

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 18:55 UTC (Fri) by LightDot (guest, #73140) [Link]

Ok, so you're saying Gnome project doesn't accept certain patches or contributions and in the same reply you're saying that Gnome project shouldn't even listen to complaints since these contributor aren't involved in the project... Right. No flaws in reasoning here whatsoever...

Anyway, this kind of stance produced Mate, Cinnamon, Nemo, etc., so all is well, open source works as intended. Significant parts of Gnome user and developer base dislike the way project is run enough to spring numerous forks, which are gaining serious momentum too.

Code talks, bs walks... I personally think code is doing the talking and actual walking here, BS is staying put. :p ;)

Heh. And I actually like many things about Gnome-shell. Imagine all those that don't...

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 10, 2012 0:24 UTC (Sat) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link]

> After a few releases of Gnome 2, the loud complainers were silently using Gnome 2...

How did you know that given that they were silent about it? I was among those who used Gnome 1 and did not like Gnome 2. I could never start to use it comfortably and silently switched to KDE in the end. I am sure a lot people have silently switched to another DE as well.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 13:20 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (4 responses)

The intention of that paragraph is entirely the opposite: At the moment fallback mode is meant to be a fallback mode. When we drop that fallback mode, anyone will be free to develop metacity, gnome-panel and so on as they wish.

If you disagree that fallback mode was a fallback when hardware support was not available: it is called fallback mode; customization was not impossible, but the default obviously had to look like GNOME 3. Various applets were ported during 3.2. Various work still went into it in later versions (ibus).

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 14:14 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

If that's the case, and if GNOME is doing this to facilitate the use of a genuine, classic GNOME-2 desktop interface with GTK+-3 and other applicable GNOME-3 technologies, then that's great news. I'll not be holding my breath for the appearance of such though. (I've switched to XFCE a while ago, as a stop-gap, and was planning to switch to MATE sometime soon, now it's packaged for Fedora).

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 20:20 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (1 responses)

The reason is still that fallback mode is not maintained. Giving people the ability to make it a GNOME 2 experience was a nice benefit. Meaning: I didn't know people even wanted to make such contributions until the gnome-panel maintainer brought it up!

Unfortunately, it seems that various other projects have specific support to make fallback mode work. So initially I was happy that as a side-benefit people would be able to get a GNOME 2 experience. At the moment I'm doubting if it is feasible because it involves way more than just gnome-panel and metacity.

To give a bit more concrete insight: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=fallback. That is the tracker bug.

BTW: Fallback mode has been discussed during the development of 3.4 already. Only since 2-3 weeks I heard that Unity apparently depends on various fallback mode bits.

So sometimes things are not intended in a bad way, but they can easily be interpreted as such. E.g. "GNOME fallback removal to kill Unity".. while in practice we (at least me) had no idea despite having discussed this for 6+ months. For the Unity case we did ask Canonical before doing an announcement... though we work in the open so official announcement is often way later than sites reporting it as news.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 21:58 UTC (Fri) by Thanatopsis (guest, #14019) [Link]

>BTW: Fallback mode has been discussed during the development of 3.4 already. Only since 2-3 weeks I heard that Unity apparently depends on various fallback mode bits.

It looks like LXDE and Xfce do as well.
http://www.webupd8.org/2012/11/fallback-mode-classic-sess...

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 21:40 UTC (Fri) by gpoo (subscriber, #56055) [Link]

In the document that you quoted in another comment, you can find an action item that says:

"Compile a list of gnome-shell extensions that can help people who prefer the GNOME 2 UX #685744" (which points to https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=685744).

That is besides of people who want to take care of gnome-panel et al. However, I really doubt there will be people stepping up to help with those packages, considering the many calls for help in the last 2 years. I would like to be proven wrong, though.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 22:01 UTC (Fri) by gpoo (subscriber, #56055) [Link]

That paragraph out of context is misleading, and I do not think the wiki page set the whole context for outsiders. I think it reflects a view rather than actual blocks or rejections.

In the last 2,5 years there are just very few patches submitted to gnome-panel, and only one (yes, 1) has been rejected for the reason given in the paragraph. Which is the following one: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674580

There were others bugs reported before GNOME 3.0 that were declared obsoletes, but those can't count as contributions to provide an alternative UI to GNOME 3.0.

I have been following gnome-panel bugs since I helped to ported it to GTK3. Even back then there was a lot of rant and, as we see today, some people assumed bad intentions, but the truth is that there was almost nobody really stepping up to give a hand.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 22, 2012 16:25 UTC (Thu) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link]

And why exactly are the Gnome devs forbidden from having a vision for their desktop, given that there exist multiple forks of Gnome 2 that are perfectly usable?