Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

> A major part of the 'cinnamon' vs 'mate' vs 'gnome 2' vs 'gnome 3' is that the Gnome devs made it the unfortunate choice of making Gnome 2 and mutually Gnome 3
> exclusive. So it was a huge pain in the ass for users to try out Gnome 3 and then go back to Gnome 2 when they realized it was not mature enough for their purposes.

That is a very inaccurate representation. None of the GNOME 2.x versions can be installed at the same time. That has been the case for the entire 2.x. Going to 3.x for loads of components just meant changing the major version from a "2" to a "3". If you couldn't install 2.2 and 2.32 at the same time, changing a major version doesn't make that "suddenly happen".

Saying GNOME made a choice to make it mutually exclusive is therefore incorrect. It wasn't possible, and we didn't do anything to make all the components installable at the same time. But that is vastly different from suggesting that was a choice that it should be this way. One can be used to suggest bad faith. That's not what happened.

This discussion happened in the open on desktop-devel-list whereby it was mentioned it was good to have, but we lacked the development effort and would appreciate people (distributions) to help out. Various distributions were aware of this discussion but didn't have the development resources.