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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!
This is just another account of how amazingly full of shit the GNOME team (Red Hat, let's just call it with it real name) continues to be. On one hand they continue NACKing the problems with their environment people have been shouting into their ears from the last two years -at least-; while now on the other they tacitally ACK them but in the same vein they do everything: arrogantly, reluctantly, thinking only about [b]control[/b].
As clearly showed in [URL="https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/"]this eye-opening essay[/URL] (and the numerous links and comments that spawned in many levels deep), the GNOME team themselves have made clear both extensions and themes are detrimental to their goal of tight CONTROL over every aspect of your involvement with GNOME, whether you are a mere user, a theme or extension dev, a third app dev, or a distro dev.
So much for the argument that "Gnome shell sucks less because you can make it so by using extensions". People, they DON'T WANT THAT. They themselves say it loudly and clearly and without a trace of regret. They *won't* change what you expect them to change. Just read carefully the linked post above. They broke the extensions and themes on each release intentionally. Now they "tackle" this issue...
At this point what they are asking themselves is this:
"how do we attempt to save our project while NOT having to ackowledge the criticism, and NOT having to drop an inch of control??".
Answer: [B]We[/B] take control of the extensions, and [b]not[/b] third parties.
For them it is a good solution, they tackle many angles at once: tighten control, avoid change, pretend change, do something about public oppinion.
In the end the outcome will be decided by the sum of the personal choice each of us has to make between "do I stop, do I stand back against people that are against what this OS was always about, do I turn my back on them and take some weight on me" or "I need the short term gain of not distracting myself with ackowledging there is a problem here and reacting to it: that myself, as a user, as a contributor to this scene am not in these people plans". Do you keep pluging your ears and go "lalalalalala everything is awesome" like these people want you to do?.
You may call me delusional, I won't give a shit. I think many of the people that have been here from the beginning in the nineties, haven't (or haven't completely yet) forgot the struggles and years of effort on part of each member in this community to get to where we got a few years ago. The issue here is *money*. The issue here is *companies wanting to subvert Linux ecosystems for money*. Just take a look at what company employees the key GNOME devs are, for christ sake. To the younger, uninformed people: educate yourselves, don't take for granted what you have now, and yes, *fight* to conserve your power over it. If you are "just" a user, your power resides in your CHOICE, and in your OPPINION. If you are a dev, you also have the power of FORK, the power of NOT PLAYING THE GAME.
As part of the planning for the DropOrFixFallbackMode feature[1], we've decided that we will compile a list of supported gnome-shell extensions. This will be a small list, focused on just bringing back some central 'classic' UX elements: classic alt tab, task bar, min/max buttons, main menu. To ensure that these extensions keep working, we will release them as a tarball, just like any other module. Giovanni already added an --enable-extensions=classic-mode configure option to the gnome-shell-extensions repository, which we will use for this work.
Also, they make it clear that this is not their preference:
Q: Why not just make gnome-shell itself more tweakable ?
A: We still believe that there should be a single, well-defined UX for GNOME 3, and extensions provide a great mechanism to allow tweaks without giving up on this vision. That being said, there are examples like the a11y menu[2] or search[3], where the shell will become more configurable in the future.
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.
XFCE. I switched from Gnome this year and haven't regreted it. It's snappy and simply does what it is supposed to do.
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.