Lack of manpower

Lack of manpower

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X, Ubuntu) is moving ahead with the "tablet-oriented" paradigm, so the Gnome people embracing it was just logical; an outdated interface (such as .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 Those dinosaurs (like me) who want an outdated, functional desktop are better served by other options such as Xfce; Gnome needs to move full-speed ahead now because there is not any other path left, and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.