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GNOME 3 To Support a "Classic" Mode, of Sorts
An anonymous reader writes "LWN.net is reporting that GNOME developer Matthias Clasen has announced that, with the upcoming demise of 'fallback mode,' the project will support a set of official GNOME Shell extensions to provide a more "classic" experience. 'And while we certainly hope that many users will find the new ways comfortable and refreshing after a short learning phase, we should not fault people who prefer the old way. After all, these features were a selling point of GNOME 2 for ten years!'"
Lets see what classic will mean :)
Saxa
GNOME is paying attention to what their users say and are listening to what the users want?
Hell must be freezing over!
Too little, too late. The project has already run off too many power users and influential people within the FOSS community. The top-down, change for the sake of change dictate has led many to question the project's leadership.
News Flash: They were faulting people who preferred the traditional way. Those who wanted a minimal and unobtrusive workspace were told to stop being stodgy luddites and get with the Metro/OSX times.
"we should not fault people who prefer the old way"
Oooh, how generously big-hearted and inclusive of them!
FTA: "And while we certainly hope that many users will find the new ways comfortable and refreshing after a short learning phase, we should not fault people who prefer the old way."
Translation: "We've lost so many users and had so many complaints that we have to do something, but we're not willing to totally capitulate, so we'll toss them something that looks like a compromise and see if they swallow it."
FTA: "After all, these features were a selling point of GNOME 2 for ten years!"
Note the exclamation point. I'd expect that from someone who's been fighting all along to keep some of GNOME 2's legacy intact - I don't expect it, and don't trust it, from someone who was, and possibly still is, ready and willing to throw all of GNOME 2 under a bus.
I'm glad they're finally making some concessions to their users, but I'd be more convinced of their sincerity if they'd been more responsive to criticism earlier on, instead of covering their ears and digging in their heels for so long.
For the time being I'm just fine with XFCE, and regardless of GNOME 3's newfound tweakability, I don't think I'll be looking to move back to the GNOME fold any time soon.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Keeping tight control is a *good* think in user interface design strategy; it provides a more focused structure and simpler environment, which were their goals.
The mistake the Gnome developers made was calling the new desktop "Gnome 3". Had they presented it as an experimental new environment and named it "Project Harmony" or "Desktop Zen", or something like that, they would have stepped on less toes and met less resistance to the radical changes, and people would have seen it in better light.
Of course they would have had less audience, as distros wouldn't have adopted it so quickly. That trade-off was their choice, but I think "Linux is awesome! There are three good major desktops now!" was a better selling point than "They've updated Gnome, and it sucks".
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I am not thankful for Matthias' condescension. A little more humility on his part in admitting Gnome 3 is bad design would be appropriate.
I'm a developer, and I have tried just about every windows manager out there. Ultimately, gnome 3 remains my choice for a few reasons.
Gnome 3 works in the most pleasing way of all the WM's without any configuration. With minimal configuration it gets a lot better. KDE is awesome after intense and sustained configuration, which also goes for a lot of the more classic WM's. But, I don't want to spend very much time configuring at all, even though I have the ability to read manuals and get what I want. That's because what I want most is to focus on my work, not on my work tools. This is coming from someone who almost obsessively learns hotkeys and configures them in any window manager, the default behavior should still be coherent and reasonable.
Gnome 3 also has the most superior window switching I've seen, and it has a very responsive flow to starting new applications. Its alt-tabbing with the way it shows you windows in other work spaces, the way it arranges windows when you hit the windows key, the hidden ribbon bar, the sensible default hotkeys (most of them inherited from gnome 2 I recognize) and the way the window manager seems to just try to get out of the way most of the time...
I want minimal, pretty, and fast. So, yes I have some seriously powerful hardware to run this on, and maybe if I were on an older machine I would want a more efficient WM, but from a user interface perspective, Gnome 3 is exactly what I want in a window manager. Task switching and window arrangement is just vastly superior to the other WM's pre-configuration.