GNOME 3.8 To Scrap Fallback Mode

An anonymous reader writes "Via LXer, an article at Phoronix tells of GNOME's plans to eliminate 'fallback mode' (GNOME classic) in the 3.8 release."

Comments

And that will also mark

[Ian Alexander]

my permanent move away from GNOME. I am learning to like XFCE!

Re:And that will also mark

[kthreadd]

my permanent move away from GNOME. I am learning to like XFCE!

I tried GNOME a few times in the 2.x series but found that it was going downhill.
In the meantime my old fvwm configuration still works.

Re:And that will also mark

[Anonymous Coward]

Same...

I hear Linus had a few nice things to say about KDE...

You should enjoy that while it lasts, apparently Linus saying anything nice a rare event. I hear he moved to the US mainly because his mom kept washing his mouth out with soap.

Re:And that will also mark

[Anonymous Coward]

You might be interested in this GNOME 2 fork

Re:And that will also mark

[pepeperes]

Same here, switched to XFCE (about the time Unity was released, as most of you, I guess) and was also considering looking again at KDE, since it made the news again :) I used SuSE for some years, some 10 years ago, and KDE was quite good, even more compared to GNOME which at the time was still very very under-developed.

I may try KDE again, though the last time i tried it, it was a bit "too much"... such HUGE menus were just uncomfortable... For me, it was an overall impression of a bit too much of everything, everywhere.

Now, I can say the only thing I really don't like in XFCE is Thunar... for me it lacks lots of functionality (like, ffs, copy-paste with right button!). But even so, i cant even think of trying to use unity or gnome shell again.

So no, it's not like we have really advanced much. With XFCE sometimes I feel a bit like 1999 again, suffering here and there with stuff that doesn't exactly work as I would like, but also feeling confident and comfortable with it.

Probably KDE will be the desktop of choice for most of the "normal" linux desktop users... until they decide it's time to move to tablet interfaces too!!

Re:And that will also mark

[Phics]

Man, there are a lot of bitter people on /. If you don't like Gnome, you'll be using XFCE or KDE or Mate or Cinnamon or something - we already know. Quit complaining about something you don't even use anymore. Every time 'Gnome' is in a post topic, we get all the same people rambling on about the same stuff, and Gnome users like myself barely bother reading anymore.

Linux has a lot of choice for a reason. Just grab the desktop you like and roll with it. If you don't like it anymore, grab a different one.

I actually like the 3.x interface and I've never used it on a touch device. Yes, it is a bold departure, but I find it makes me more productive all in all. I dislike nested menus - always have. I can't think of a bigger waste of time than browsing a nested menu system looking for an app, and if you're using the 'Applications' view in Gnome 3.x, you're definitely doing things the hard way. Hitting the 'Windows' key, typing the first few characters of my target software, and then the 'Enter' key to launch apps makes a lot of sense. The quick gesture of ramming my mouse into the corner to arrange work-spaces works great.

Re:And that will also mark

[drooling-dog]

Aaaaaaaand... we've come full-circle. Look how much more productive you can be with this amazing new thing!

Re:And that will also mark

[jonadab]

> Quit complaining about something you don't even use anymore.

The complaining stems from the fact that something really genuinely good has been deliberately taken away from us. Gnome 1.x was much better than any of the other options. It did everything we wanted a desktop environment to do. It had all the features we wanted, and every single one of them was fully configurable.

Then someone decided "options are bad" and started taking it all away. At first we thought it was just because of the rewrite (when they rewrote 2.0 to use the new GTK), so we hung in there, thinking we'd eventually get our features back... but then they started taking away more and more and more. By the time we realized what was going on, it was too late to fork 1.x, because it would no longer compile against contemporary libraries. (Gnome has always had eleventy bajillion dependencies.)

Then in the 3.x series they started inserting more and more *unwanted* features. I don't just mean unnecessary features that I personally don't have any need for; it goes beyond that. I'm talking about features that are actively intrusive and cannot be turned off, like the way it now insists on popping up extra windows you don't want while you're in the middle of trying to work on other things, and this behavior cannot be disabled. Gnome has become so horrible, it beggars the imagination to realize that every release they still manage somehow to find a way to make it yet worse.

It's really sad. Gnome used to be something I could not just use but also happily recommend. Now it's so awful, I can't imagine anyone actually liking it.

Re:And that will also mark

[Taco Cowboy]

Quit complaining about something you don't even use anymore.

You sound very much like someone from the central politburo committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
 
Luckily the CCP has no say in the Linux Scene, or I would be starting to re-learning to use Microsoft Windoze.

Re:And that will also mark

[mrbluze]

I've been satisfied with MATE, having been introduced to it by Linux Mint.

Yes, Linux Mint with Mate is the most usable Linux distro I have found at the moment (ie: user friendly, community supported, easily recognizable), so it's what the family uses, but for productivity I have settled with KDE especially since it now has proper color management. I can actually understand where Gnome is going with its user interface. Hands-on displays are probably going to become the norm which does require a rethink and general overhaul of the interface, and the mouse will gradually become redunant. People (like me) who are used to the mouse and keyboard might find it hard to see how productivity can improve without the two, but if you imagine that in a year or two there will be large (A4 or even A3 size), high resolution displays that sit horizontally on a desk or a lectern, which have multi-touch interfaces plus pressure sensitive pen devices, then a mouse is totally redundant and a keyboard an optional extra. At that point we could finally say that computers are a true paper replacement.

Re:And that will also mark

[jbolden]

Gnome 1.x was rather low functionality compared to KDE. And if you wanted functionality KDE was then and is today the more obvious choice. It makes sense for the desktop environments to fork and Gnome to go in a different way with different objectives. KDE was going to be a traditional Unix GUI but better, while Gnome 2 was going to become more like GDI / Aqua. Gnome 3 is and was moving in the direction of supporting new hardware, the same way Windows 8 is.

Re:And that will also mark

[hey!]

Car analogy time. I have a neighbor who drives a BMW. I drive a Honda Accord. We both like our cars for good reasons. He likes the things he can do with this car. I have no desire to do those things, and I appreciate the simple, well thought-out control layout of the Honda. They're both great cars for different reasons, and they both objectively fit our subjective needs better than the other would.

One thing that Linux has made apparent over the last decade is there doesn't have to be One True Desktop that everyone has to use. I've tried KDE and found that the bells and whistles are intriguing but not something that really makes much of a difference to me. I think part of this is that I no longer live in a totally desktop-centric world, spending considerable time on tablets and smartphones so I appreciate the marginal features of KDE less and the simplicity of XFCE more. Others may have different needs.

That's not to say I don't find occasions where I'd rather be using KDE or Gnome, but by in large I'm happy with my day to day use of XFCE as I am driving my boring but functional Accord. The analogy isn't perfect since the Accord is almost without exception well thought out and XFCE has a few rough spots -- someone else mentioned Thunar and I totally agree it should be better. But you have to judge a desktop environment by its overall effect, and I appreciate XFCE's simplicity, responsiveness, and predictability.

Disclaimer: some of the opinions are based on using Ubuntu, and my opinions no doubt have been shaped by the distro's choices of KDE releases -- to say nothing of Gnome! This may well be another virtue of XFCE, that its focus on producing a simple and conventional desktop rather than a "cutting edge" desktop results in fewer distro-introduced hiccups in the user experience.

Re:And that will also mark

[countach74]

Kwin performs great assuming you don't use any window decorations with shadows or transparency. Doesn't miss a beat, even when running open source radeon drivers, animation-wise. As for general performance, I've never noticed an issue. Everything is quite snappy.

Re:And that will also mark

[arun_s]

I'm a heavy KDE user but I keep switching DEs and WMs every now and then. Currently I'm playing with Enlightenment which is as pretty as it always has been. More importantly, it starts up on my aging laptop in less than 2 seconds, which is years ahead of both Gnome and KDE. As another lightweight but full-fledged alternative to the big two, I recommend it highly.

Re:And that will also mark

[0123456]

People (like me) who are used to the mouse and keyboard might find it hard to see how productivity can improve without the two, but if you imagine that in a year or two there will be large (A4 or even A3 size), high resolution displays that sit horizontally on a desk or a lectern, which have multi-touch interfaces plus pressure sensitive pen devices, then a mouse is totally redundant and a keyboard an optional extra.

Yeah, because we're all going to sit hunched over a huge touchscreen lying flat on our desks, pressing on the screen to create Excel spreadsheets.

Tech like this has been available for years (I had an interview for a company producing large touchscreen panels like that in the early 90s) and it's never taken off because, outside specialist uses and TV shows, it's simply retarded.

Re:And that will also mark

[afgam28]

The movement against excessive options started with an article by Havoc Pennington that describes why Linux desktops had such bad user interfaces back in the 90s and early 2000s:

http://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html

You have to read it with the proper historical context in mind. Some examples he gives of the state of the desktop at the time are:

* Emacs having a broken-by-default cut and paste feature, and you had to go into the preferences dialog to make it standards-compliaint
* Gnome 1.x used to have 5 different clock applets, and during usability testing people would asking why are there 5 clocks to choose? More of a problem was that they assumed that there was a good reason for having 5 clocks, and would then spend a lot of time thinking about which of the 5 clocks was right for them.

It wasn't so much an idea that "options are bad" but rather that "options have a cost", and so excessive options are bad and that the default option should be something reasonable. There should never be an option to "unbreak" something like clipboard standards.

You could argue that Gnome 3.x takes it too far (I disagree, but that's just my opinion), but there are good reasons to remove the fallback mode. The fact is, no one uses it. The people who the fallback mode is targetted towards have already (very vocally!) moved to KDE/XFCE. So why bother developing something for users who aren't going to use it anyway?

Re:And that will also mark

[unixisc]

For netbooks or other weaker laptops, Razor-qt would be a good alternative to KDE-netbook option

Re:And that will also mark

[MSG]

Then someone decided "options are bad" and started taking it all away.

The guiding thought is that every option MULTIPLIES code complexity. Options tend to interact with other options, and testing is required to verify that all options work together, or that the system provides a means of preventing options that don't from being used together. The drive to simplify interfaces is intended to reduce the number of bugs present in the system.

As a secondary effect, removing optional behavior forces developers to make sure that the normal behavior is sane and doesn't need dozens of radio buttons on a configuration app.

Then allow for a blacklist override

[sethstorm]

That way, recompilation/patching isn't needed when a GNOME developer arbitrarily blacklists a chipset and goes out of their way to avoid fixing it (such as with the ATI R100 series).

It's one thing to have llvmpipe, it's another when the developer puts large amounts of effort to keep something broken.

Re:idiots

[Alex Belits]

Actually this is an improvement. Fallback mode was mostly a non-functional imitation of a Gnome 2 interface in the minimal default configuration that no one used.

Ubuntu and classic mode

[Weaselmancer]

Will they fork, or will they stick with the dippy new interface? Because I have to say I tried the new interface. And I find it doesn't help me much. First thing I do on a new system is to "sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback" and login under the old system.

Oh, and don't think I'm in curmudgeon mode and simply don't like new things. I really tried to like the new system, I really did. But having to right click on Terminal and select "open new session" to get a second shell up is ANNOYING AS FUCK. Come on guys! You know that's not how we work. If you don't have half a dozen command prompts up you're not busy. Why make it harder to do that?

So for me, this is the end of Gnome. I need something that helps me work, not gets in the way of work. I like the system but if you ditch the "classic" aka "useful" mode, well sorry. Gotta go find something else.

Couldn't believe it, had to RTFA

[blind biker]

At first I thought it was creative editing on the part of the submitter, so I did the unthinkable, and RTFA - and it's fucking there, right smack at the beginning:

Matthias Clasen on the behalf of the GNOME Release Team has announced that they have decided to eliminate GNOME's "fallback mode" with the upcoming 3.8 release

Ya know? KDE is looking better every day, thanks to the Gnome developers.

Re:idiots

[Dahamma]

And Fedora is their biggest supporter. For christsakes I just found with Fedora 17 they don't even include the Unix man pages in the default installation. Sigh.

After 5 years' Linux usage, I'm switching to Mac

[mfearby]

I've been using KDE for about six months now since the Unity fiasco drove me away from Ubuntu (with a year's Debian use on the way, with GNOME 2.3x before the more-recent KDE/openSUSE install).

However, I've reached that point in my life where I just want things to work, and since the Mac OS is not hostile to most of the open-source tools I use every day (and will continue using), switching to a desktop that "just works" means I should get the best of both worlds. I won't have to hunt down special repositories to get essential things installed any more, and I won't have to read lengthy HOWTOs to get some basic things working. I've been using my brother's Late 2011 Mac Mini for a day now and I'm very happy with the polish, the smoothness, the speed, and the complete lack of fuss. I doubt I'll ever really love the Finder, and the Dock has never impressed me much, but everything else will be a joy to use.

Sorry, Linux, but after more than a decade of "Is this the year of Linux on the desktop?" predictions, the old adage about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results applies. Linux is still Balkanised and I still have to fight to get simple things to work. I'll still keep Linux for a LAMP server (bare metal or VM, haven't decided) and you'll have to pry Mythbuntu from my cold, dead, hands in the lounge room, but sadly there is no longer a place for Linux as my main desktop operating system. And now that Microsoft are doing their best to drive away their loyal user base, I see an even brighter future ahead for the Mac ecosystem. I may as well stop fighting it.

FTFA: "software-accelerated"

[subreality]

What, were they drawing it by hand before?

Re:After 5 years' Linux usage, I'm switching to Ma

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it "just works" for you, but every time I've tried to use MacOS X, I had to give up in a short time and go back to KDE. This thing is just too infuriatingly dumbed down. For example I need focus follows mouse and absolutely detest the "active window is top window" mode. It always amazes me how "power users" can actually stand the MacOS X desktop, but I guess everybody is different.

Re:idiots

[sjames]

And it was STILL more useful than the full mode.

Re:After 5 years' Linux usage, I'm switching to Ma

[Anonymous Coward]

Some users (especially shortcut-heavy users) just want to get the cursor out of the way and focus follows mouse effectively wrecks that.

Re:After 5 years' Linux usage, I'm switching to Ma

[unapersson]

After 15+ years Linux usage I'm sticking with GNOME3 because I also want things to just work, and it gives me what I want, a clean desktop which stays out of my way most of the time. I simply did the GNOME2 to GNOME3 transition without stopping at Unity in between.

If I didn't like GNOME3 then there are so many alternatives that are simply an apt-get install away that I simply can't understand all the whining. I'd likely go back to WindowMaker or fluxbox.

3d desktop is a waste

[aglider]

Not just of CPU/GPU/WPU cycles.
It's a waste of user attention to the things that matter!
How often in a day do you "enjoy" your 3D desktop with 3D rotating/rolling/whatevering windows and gadgets?
Maybe I'm an outsider, but a have no more than 3 windows on the screen: 1 is the web browser, 1 is a local terminal, 1 is a remote terminal on the development server.
I don't see any need for 3D stuff here.
How many windows do you have in use at the same time? How often you switch among them? How much fun you have in waiting for the fancy 3D stuff to complete?

Re:After 5 years' Linux usage, I'm switching to Ma

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why real OSes allow the user to choose how their UI works, rather than forcing the "best" configuration on them.

Gnome: I never got the hype or the recent rage

[Qbertino]

I've never understood the Gnome hype to begin with.

I did like the fact that FOSS has two large desktop kits competing each other - that is a neat luxury - but the hype about Gnome I couldn't understand. The only thing Gnome really had going for it, compared to KDE or generic custom WM setups like a WindowMaker environment, in my opinion, was that you could, back then in 2001, with a litte work, get your desktop look totally different and awesome compared to anything else on the planet. But that was a large part to the relatively hassle-free GTK theming, and not on behalf of Gnome. And the people who did that usually did it using Enlightenment as their main environment as the way better choice anyway. And even without E, in my opinion WM or some default Fluxbox setup allways looks better than a bland and somewhat half-assed Gnome UI.

For the better part of the last decade Nautilus was flaky software in beta stage compared to KDEs Konqueror. Konqueror would kick Nautiluses ass up and down the street in terms of features and usability. It was the best FM on the entire plantet, and probably still is ... although I haven't been keeping up with all the details, changes and redos in the FOSS Desktop world since about 2006 so I couldn't really say. FOSS developers have a tendency to break things just to redo entire core-pieces of code or come up with new projects. ... What was that FM thing for KDE a few years back? Dolphin or something? ... Dunno, didn't care. I just remember thinking: "Oh, great, some guy fucking up Konqueror and thinking he can do better than about a decade of FM projekt work. Great." ...
Anyway, I am now using Gnome (2.something) on debian stable because it is the default and it's still way better than windows, but it does bug me with shit I'd expect not to have to put up with in 2012. The Filemanager (still nautilus? couldn't tell) wets its pants when accessing a dir across samba with the svn extension blocking the FM for minutes. Firefox has rendering errors in the tabs, and while the desktop pager works as expected, as far as I can tell it looks very much the same as it did eleven years ago in 2001. And even then E and WM had pagers at least as good, and you could run and customize them with a few lines of easy configging.

With KDE its a simular thing, althoug I'd say they did (and do) way better with the integrated desktop thing. KDE allways had Windows-style performance hog qualities, but they *did* offer the full Desktop experience. I'd bet that to this very day a well configured KDE is the best GUI on the planet, on a machine that can handle the workload. And yes, I know the Mac, I'm typing this on an MB Air with Snow Leopard. However, it wasn't that the KDE team hadn't also been smoking their share of crack while coding. Some dimwhit back in the 90ies had the brilliant Idea to copy the entire Windows KB shortcuts and make them KDE default, thus fucking with the entire userbase of opinion leaders that actually cared about them: The core FOSS unix crowd. As far as I know it has been that way since then. Granted, rare things are as easy to config as KB shortcuts in KDE, but come on! That's, in my book, at least as bad a markting move as Gnome is doing now with v3. Allthough I have to say that ever since Gnome v3 came about posts about gnome on slashdot have at least trippled. ... Maybe not so bad marketing after all. Gnome is refreshing its mindshare with its moves, that's for sure.

Whatever way you put it, the real anoyances with Linux on the desktop are still the same they were 15 years ago when I started using it, and they have nothing to do with wether the Gnome (or any other desktop or WM) crew has decided to make a paradigm shift or not.

I've seen the screens of Gnome 3, I've installed the newest Ubuntu with Unity on a netbook for my daughter (yes, yes, odd and dumbed down, but it's not the end of the world there are some neat ideas in Unity and the Terminal works as exp

Re:Gnome: I never got the hype or the recent rage

[Evil Pete]

I wish I had mod points. Agree completely. I recently installed Bodhi Linux, based on Ubuntu 12.04, using Enlightenment. So beautiful. But I don't mind Unity or gnome 2, or KDE. Though gnome and KDE are damn resource hogs. After a while you just want to do stuff and not wait to see dancing monkeys around the borders of your terminal window.

FOSS can do some great stuff but they can also just lose their way. Dolphin & konqueror. Bloody friggin Nautilus, what a pile of junk. I used to run a standard test whenever I fired up a new distro with gnome: load it into another partition, run Nautilus and copy/paste my mounted home directory to the new install partition. My home dir had about 150,000 files ... Nautilus always failed (for about 7 years it failed this test every year until I just gave up bothering about it); Konqueror no problems.

Re:Gnome: I never got the hype or the recent rage

[Jahava]

Not much else to do but agree. However, you should really give KDE4 another shot. Ever since KDE4.5 or so, it has been a fully-usable (albeit heavy) desktop environment. It's achieved the level of maturity and configurability I've always associated with the KDE3 line, and has added several features that are genuinely useful (such as window grouping, tiling support, a full semantic desktop, and several powerful UI scripting techniques), as well as the traditional KDE integration technologies. After some early 4.x struggles, I'm once again in love with the full KDE user experience.

I've done my tour of GNOME2, XFCE, KDE3, Enlightenment, xmonad, GNOME3, Unity, and KDE4, and I would, for primary desktop purposes, choose KDE4 without hesitation at the moment. Definitely worth giving it another shot if you haven't already.

Re:GNOME 3 rules, you totally owe them an apology

[epyT-R]

1. it's ok to have an opinion
2. it's ok to express that opinion regardless how it impacts others' feelings.
3. free doesn't exempt something from critique

Re:idiots

[OolimPhon]

Er, except that Debian is moving to Gnome 3 with Wheezy.

Tried a test installation prior to planning a site upgrade. WTF? DO NOT LIKE.

Looked around the Debian forums. Replies to "Can we have Gnome 2 back?" are met with "Why don't you help make Gnome 3 better instead?"

DO NOT WANT.

Tried Mate but it isn't ready for prime time yet, too many holes. Ended up with LXDE instead, adequate.

Re:After 5 years' Linux usage, I'm switching to Ma

[BeanThere]

My perception of Mac OS X in short: UNIX/Linux with a straight jacket.

Toddlerization of the UI

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

[...] Yes, it is a bold departure, but I find it makes me more productive all in all.[...] The quick gesture of ramming my mouse into the corner to arrange work-spaces works great.

Until someone decides that particular gesture opens your email in the newest, bold departure from convention.

The problem many people have with Gnome 3, KDE 4, Unity, Wayland, Windows Vista, Windows 8 etc. is that people keep changing stuff dramatically. Nobody complains about a new color scheme, we complain in great numbers about removing helpful features we like to use and replacing those with dumbed down stuff (let's call it Toddlerization of the UI) that emulates the latest cool overpriced toy.

I use computers for other stuff than hitting the screen roughly in some spot in a 4x6 coordinate system to start an "app" that is in 97.23% of the cases just another un(sup)portable spyware "website".

Those people taking these decisions are often more concerned about what they'd like to do or what they find Kooool. Rather than considering what is easy and agreeable to use for the actual user. It's their prerogative to do so, but don't complain when users start complaining and then start leaving in droves...

I'm aware that in FOSS you can always express your discontent with a fork (instead of a knive). I'll probably turn away from Ubuntu