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

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.

Re:And that will also mark

[Anonymous Coward]

You might be interested in this GNOME 2 fork

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: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:idiots

[sjames]

And it was STILL more useful than the full mode.

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: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.

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.