GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode [LWN.net]

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 13:20 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (guest, #27950)
In reply to: GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode by paulj
Parent article: GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

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).

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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.