GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode [LWN.net]

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 10, 2012 8:02 UTC (Sat) by suckfish (guest, #69919)
Parent article: GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

> We've come to the conclusion that we can't maintain

I'm guessing due to a lack of man-power...

I've come to the conclusion [from a position of blissful ignorance] that gnome's main problem is simply a lack of developers.

Gnome 3 did have some really great ideas. But trying to use it, I've simply never found it mature or fleshed out enough for day to day usage.

So which came first and caused the other; the lack of manpower or the ongoing slow death of Gnome?

I suspect the lack of manpower - Ubuntu are the only people making a serious investment in the Linux desktop, and they've gone their own way. Gnome seems to have a handful of active developers; compare that to e.g., Mozilla's 500 odd employees; how many people do you think MS has working on their desktop and basic UI infrastructure, I'll bet at least 10 times as many as gnome, wouldn't be surprised if it's 100 times as many.

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Lack of manpower

Posted Nov 12, 2012 9:00 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Yes, I am thinking the same (as a complete outsider). The fact that it works great for some people, and not so great for others, suggests that the Gnome people have optimized certain workflows but not others. They speak about having to choose and they have chosen, which is painful but better than half-carrying many loads. What remains is a lot of small problems which need solving.

At this point it is not a question of "should have innovated"; everyone else (Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu) is moving ahead with the "tablet-oriented" paradigm, so the Gnome people embracing it was just logical; an outdated interface (such as . So abandoning fallback mode makes sense: either they improve the overall desktop or maintain two different versions. Those dinosaurs (like me) who want an outdated, functional desktop are better served by other options such as Xfce; Gnome needs to move full-speed ahead now because there is not any other path left, and perhaps make the desktop usable again for everyone in a few years.

Oh, and extensions are a ticking bomb: they have solved their immediate problems but at the cost of adding lots of configuration options. Anyone having used a classic Mac OS 7-9 desktop will start shivering at the mention of extension conflcts.