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SolusOS Forks Gnome 3 Fallback Mode
An anonymous reader writes "Linux distribution SolusOS has forked the GNOME 3 'fallback mode' that the GNOME Project decided to scrap with the upcoming 3.8 GNOME release. According to SolusOS, the fork, named Consort, can 'maintain an experience virtually identical to GNOME 2, but vastly improve it with no need for hardware acceleration such as with GNOME Shell or Cinnamon.' It 'will bring back all the old features, such as right click-interaction on the panel, GNOME 2 applet support, creating desktop launchers, etc' and 'allow Python GNOME 2 applets to run natively on consort-panel.'"
It's good to see that there are people out there taking up the good fight in developing *good/usable* user interfaces that just work. If the Gnome 3 developers didn't literally have their heads up their arses, this necessity wouldn't be happening. Though...Windows 8 actually makes Gnome 3 look somewhat usable...that's not saying much.
So what are the actual differences? Does the fallback mode use GTK3 or something? It sounds like everything promised is exactly Gnome 2.
How can they not see the destruction of their ecosystem right in front of them? They worked so damned hard to make GNOME 2 the best damned environment, and it grew like a weed with Ubuntu. And then sometime around 2009 everyone just lost their damned minds and destroyed it all for no good reason at all.
All they've done is make all of the users unhappy, removed and broke functionality. They're too busy cutting off their own limbs to fix actual problems anymore. How do the leaders in GNOME not see this happening? It's a damned shame.
Instead of helping GNOME to modernize fallback mode (it used deprecated GNOME technologies like Bonobo, etc) as they were saying they didn't have the manpower for that, these people forks, no matter there ir already another fork Matte (that I think could be avoided if people helped modernize GNOME fallback mode)
Fallback mode was scrapped because no one wanted to maintain deprecated and ugly things like orbit and Bonobo, if someone volunteered to udpate GNOME Panel to new technologies, including GTK3, I wouldn't have happened
On the "mainstream desktop" you are stuck eating whatever rancid poo your proprietary OS vendor wants to feed you.
Good luck with that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Maybe it's the cynicism growing on me but I don't get the constant bitching and moaning over desktop decorations. Back in the day I used KDE3.x and it was fine. Then I used Gnome 2.x and it was fine. Now I use Unity and it is just fine too. On my low-end tinker-boxes, I use Openbox and Fbpanel. And it's all fine. Alt-f2, Alt-tab, Alt-f4, and Alt-Space work everywhere. Focus on your applications, fellas; that's what's important.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
...and already the same old discussion of "I use {inset DE} therefore it is the only good one and all others are dumb" has started.
I tried GNOME 3 when it was still pretty new, didn't like it very much, and switched to another desktop. I've heard it's improved a lot so I'll probably give it another shot in the near future, but it's not a big priority for me because XFCE is already extremely usable and configurable.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
People who have real work to do are already using XFCE.
Did you ever consider that some folks who cut their teeth on Gnome 2.x UI are just vastly more productive using that interface? For those folks, this is a big draw.
Why should I change my comfortable UI habits just because some OS Distro (ie, Microsoft, Canonical, etc) wants change for change's sake? I'm sure there's as much to hate about XFCE as Gnome2. To each their own.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Don't we already have this? MATE anyone?
And yet there's less to hate about both of those put together than there is to hate about Gnome3. At least this new Consort thing is being done by people concerned more with usability than with "must get rid of everything old! must do everything different, even if it makes it unusable!"
If the Gnome 3 developers didn't literally have their heads up their arses, this necessity wouldn't be happening.
And by "literally", you mean "figuratively, but with strong emotion!". That is, unless there have been some bizarre death scenes among the Gnome 3 devs I haven't read about yet.
If you get forked 4 times in less than 2 years, you're probably doing something wrong! Unity, Cinnamon, MATE, now this; this is a record IIRC.
Before Gnome 3 and Unity we had KDE, Gnome 2 and XFCE along with a host of other lightweight desktop environments.
The big three all had the same or similar overall UI elements. A "start" menu, icons on the desktop, windowed applications and a task bar.
Now, we have Unity, KDE, Gnome 3, Gnome 2 forks, XFCE, the same collection of various lightweight window managers and desktop environments. Also, apparently, this.
Personally, I'm glad major players diverged significantly from the GUI elements we've all seemed to carry along from Windows 95. It is, in fact, a brave new world with touch screens and tablets. Sure it's arduous, and not cool for desktop productivity but it's only been 2 or 3 years. Maybe it will get better, or maybe some other options will become more popular. The point is, I'm glad I have something new to play around with.
And besides, it's not like you don't have choices if you liked the old way. I was a die-hard Gnome 2 fan, but now I use XFCE and I can hardly tell the difference.
As long as there are people willing to use and fund these forks I don't see a problem. The devs are investing their own time - why should anyone complain?
I even find it poignant in a way, the "bringing back old features" pitch. Trying to revive the past, being nostalgic... but above all, having the skill to actually do something about it instead of just whine - so kudos to whoever is behind this.
That's precisely why Linux will always suck on the desktop. When you think Windows, there's ONE. When you think Mac, there's ONE. When you think Linux, there are hundreds.
But that rancid poo usually still works better than the Linux desktop of the month version 0.1.
Yeah, it's a waste of resources, space, and time.
... ever getting on the mainstream desktop.
What makes you think the goal is making Linux a "mainstream" desktop? Windows is perfect as the mainstream desktop - it lets the non-technical masses post pictures of fluffy puppies to all their friends on the fashionable social media site of the month, and indulge in rambling flame wars about the relative merits of "Cool Ranch Flavour" versus "Nacho Cheese Flavour" on their favourite World of Cornchips forum, and maybe play some fun little games. The rest of us are happy with our non-mainstream OSes that we use to get real work done.
Can you imagine if OSes were like vehicles? Of course, it's okay for *me* to drive a 32-tonne truck to the shops for my morning paper, but can you imagine if *everyone* did it? Madness...
Personnaly I'm sick and tired of all the distro's: Ubuntu, Fedora and
even Mint/Cinnamon.
They ALL spell REGRESSION. ...backwards, sideways, upside down, mirrored, whatever.
R E G R E S S S I O N.
regression.
Niosserrger...
And there isn't a mouse or tablet or gesture or kick in the groin that
will do them any good or correct this wanton purposeful dimwittery.
So, -- for me, compiz, plus cairo-dock, plus emerald, will get my
attention.
Gnome 2 was a good companion that was dragged to the street and shot in the head without a emotion by its devs, since there has been a handful of forks and workalikes. I cant find anything on these except opinion and dont have time to sit down and fiddle fart installing DE's to find out what the differences, quirks, and compatibilities are.
There is just not enough signal in the noise on the gnome 2 wannabe's IMO
I observed 10 years of stagnation to bring Linux Desktop closer to actual mass adaption, because the desktop GUI being fragmented, with every new fork . . . . never really gaining any momentum. And any fork trying to re-implement the very same again and again, over and over . . . (facepalm)
Have you ever used Gnome3, you dumb fuck?
Apparently it makes you retarded...
There are many meanings of multiheaded mode, but Gnome 3 broke the most use style: 2 seperate screens. This was the most usable form, but instead on Apple/Microsoft learning what actually is usable, the gnome folks went the horrid Apple/Microsoft way (one large display spread over multiple screens).
I want each of my monitors to have seperate desktops and when I switch to the other desktop, leave the old on alone doing what it was doing (refreshing my network management web page, showing output from a compile in xterm, whatever). Both desktops should have independent virtual screens (1x8-12, none of this 2x2 sillyness of Microsoft/Unity).
What are these gnome 3 developers thinking when they destroy very good and useful functionality. Why wobbly windows, why such 1-2 seconds of my time doing silly animations of unreadable wiondows. Sliding windows are not too bad, you can start to lock in on what you want during the slide. Wobble is just plain out.
Compiz is dead
It's all about Wayland now...
>>"... just vastly more productive using that interface?"
It's just what they are used to. They confuse familiarity born of experience with better design and intuitiveness. That leads to entirely bogus rants about how the Gnome devs are supposed to let biased online anecdotal rants plot their course.
The differences between all of the desktop GUI's -- Gnome 2, Gnome 3, KDE, XFCE, OS X, Windows, etc., are minor. In all and each of them, we type on keyboards, move on on-screen cursor, and click on icons. Gnome3 does away with cute little icons in panels and deprecates minimization and people freak out as if those two things were the only way to do anything. People rant about Windows 8 because it is different than what they know. Yet, wait until Microsoft replaces Windows 8 with something entirely different and people who have used nothing else but Win8 will be ranting about how wonderfully easy, productive and intuitive it was.
Some people are so conservative and so rigid that they can't muster up the ability to deal with new software on its own terms, instead bitching because it doesn't work like the old software they know.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
He brings teh Funnehz
At least in this instance, I think fragmentation is showing that GNOME has made some very serious mistakes. During GNOME 2.x I can't recall any time when there were discussions of forking GNOME. While it was not held above criticism, it seemed to have been widely enough accepted by people that GNOME 2 did what it was designed to do well enough not to precipitate a fork. It just wasn't worth it. GNOME 3 has spawned MATE, Cinnamon, maybe one or two others, and now a fork of the deprecated fallback mode. It just keeps spawning controversy and losing support from developers (or at least it looks that way from the outside).
Meanwhile, KDE is chugging along quite happily and XFCE's userbase appears to be growing.
>> " just vastly more productive using that interface?"
Some of have never like pointless wiggly windows and ugly, gaudy over-large shiny dock icons that look like they were designed by a 1950's middle school art class.
Compiz irritated me for years. Turning it off was always top of my agenda. I like and use docks, but can't stand Cairo. I don't know what taste is, but Cairo has never had it.
Use what you like. So will I. But neither of us gets to equate what we like with what is better.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
XFCE would be perfect if it used Gtk3. Unfortunately it does not, and it does not look like it is going to any time soon. The same thing goes for MATE actually.
As someone who uses a Linux box to do real-work and escape from both the proprieterty lock-in and security nightmare of Wimdoze I am fed up to the very back teeth with the stupidity and arrogance of the UI Gang.
Be it Gnome or KDE it is too much, I have to spend 30 minures turning off the latest greatest slowing kitsch and I have to use tripwire, not the documentation to tell me where the config went so I can script it.
Hint, KDE, I don't want to wait 5 seconds while you slowly fade-in your startup page, I do not want to feel sea-sick every time I move a window.
Finally is it too hard to produce an rpm/deb for each major release so I don't have to hand craft one.
More generally for this stuff, why bother with a _64 build on Intel 86, you don't need the address space and you pull silly sizeof(int) != sizeof(void *) bugs from hell and gone. Just build the 32 bit version.
MFG, omb
we have always had many distros and uis but the Ubuntu gnome 2 combo was the number 1 choice among users.then gnome decided to blow up a good thing. so ubuntu hates this and well we all did but rather then do the smart thing and fork gnome 2 they come up with the horrid unity.
lol wasn't that supposed to take over the linux world like 2 years ago.
Personally, I like the fact that more DE options are appearing. Given that many are Gnome forks, I think it shows that the Gnome developers have gone off in a less-than-satisfying direction for many long-time users. So be it. I don't pay them to develop for me; I'm perfectly ok with letting them scratch their own itches. I don't like Gnome-Shell, I don't like Unity, and I haven't tried Mate, but Cinnamon seems pretty agreeable to me. I'll give Consort a shot - who knows, maybe I'll like it.
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
funny, I happen to have replaced solusos2 with mint14 today as, after 6 months of common use and very little tinkering, I lost sound and a proper office suit (it refused to update libre office for some reason, and openoffice wouldn't work either). Youtube videos also played fast forward plus some minor issues with my status-bar icons.
i thought solusos was mainly the work of one man, funny to see it appear on /.
have fun in windows 8 with a DE you CAN'T replace.
at least we have a plethra of options to run to when devs decide to fuck us.
you have nothing.
Imagine you have a nice and shiny turd. It looks okay from a distance, but when you get closer, you realise it smells rather bad and you can't use it for anything more useful than throwing it at the primates watching you in the zoo. Then take all the shine off it, let's call it a fall back turd. You are left with an ugly stinking turd. Why would you want to polish it? Gnome3 fall back mode is all the bad parts of the gnome3 shell, without all they eye candy. It's bad for productivity and usability, no matter how much compositing you throw at it. I can't think of a single argument why you would want to fork just the bad interaction design bit of it. Someone needs to take it out back behind the barn and put an end to it's suffering. It'd be the humane thing to do to all the users and developers wasting time on it.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Those Gnome developers have f>kup the entire desktop experience, and their vision of an UN-configurable, no-options, hidden-menus, "just Works" by magic philosophy will only create dumber users, so Gtk3 should also be forked and let "Gnome 4.x" wither and die.
Fallback mode is going away in GNOME 3.8. But recognizing that some people miss the functionality provided by the old panel, there are going to be some official extensions to emulate some of it.
No, it's not going to be exactly the same. So those who like to complain can still do that.
They are not really concerned about cooperation. Linux mint is a free loader of Canonical works ( because the only thing they do is the visible part ), who is not exactly the most contributing player in the field, and they already depend partially on Debian for lots of their distro. That's fair game of course. Then LMDE came, and managed to collaborate neither with Ubuntu nor Debian, and then Solus-os, made by the same people than LMDE not even try to collaborate with Gnome nor Mint. Heck, they do not even try to work with Mate people. ( on nemo )
They are not concerned about usability, they are concerned into keeping their habits because they think this is better. If they were concerned with usability, they would at least try to explain their ideas, do some usability testing, show the design, etc. They don't, they just did some git clone and that's it.
I am sure in the end, they will end like mate people and start getting all their commit from gnome, until this slowly become too late. Then the developers will start to fight each others and split more ( because when you do not care enough to work with upstream despite having disagreements, you surely do not care about the rest of the team, you forked once, so you can fork a 2nd time )
They will end like the trinity and kde3 revival desktop. When the developers of a software leave it and say this is better to start from scratch, they are not doing it to annoy others usually. They are doing because they know it cannot be done, because they did since years.
First used KDE when it was the default on FreeBSD v4 or v5, and i hated all the "K" crap so when Gnome came along i switched. Well today i just went back to KDE after using Gnome for about ten years. While using Gnome 3.x i'm constantly reminded how the Gnome Dev's have fu>k-up the U.I., and it makes me think about how to best organize ways to Fork Gtk and/or Gnome 3.x. I guess i'll try to contribute to one of the Forks.
That's why you don't use "Linux desktop of the month", you use xmonad.
You know, unlike /. comenting, doing real work take time.
Your options become limited if your apps are too closely tied to your DE.
If we were talking about X server replacements that all speak the same protocol, noone would be bothered.
But you Linux geniuses forgot the KISS principle long ago and now it's pick your DE according to your app. You DON'T have the freedom to choose anymore. And that's when your gazillion options bite you.
Looks like Linux, too, is only viable in any area if someone takes your hand and forces one interface down your throat (Android, Routers, ...)
Acgtually, I don't really care what desktop environment I use. I find that it is the applications I am using that determine my productivity or not. I rarely sit there staring at an empty desktop.
You don't need to change you're comfortable ways: Don't upgrade.
Just don't pretend developers are obligated to keep updating the innards so you can run current software.
Developers who give their stuff away for free usually do pretty much what they damn well please.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
i don't think you understood that then bought 2 years ago both fedora and ubuntu where calling it the second coming of god and saying it was going to be in there next release of there distros. everybody knew it was not even close to being ready. it had nothing to do with the wayland devs.
You don't need to change you're comfortable ways: Don't upgrade.
Just don't pretend developers are obligated to keep updating the innards so you can run current software.
Developers who give their stuff away for free usually do pretty much what they damn well please.
Even developers who don't give there stuff away for free usually do pretty much what they damn well please, or at least their company does.
Mate currently works, just as you say. However, where it will fail is as more applications make use of Gnome 3 libraries and GTK 3, whether because Redhat/Fedora use it or Ubuntu uses it under Unity, eventually using Mate as your desktop will mean you will have a mix of all sorts of libraries and their will inevitably be conflicts.
Holding on to Gnome 2 is like holding on to Windows XP. It may still work, but eventually, you will be forced to upgrade to something more current because new releases of software won't work with it.
"Your options become limited if your apps are too closely tied to your DE."
not really.
gnome apps still work in KDE, and vice versa, except you pull a lot more libraries.
modern computers with 500GB HDs, where the user never uses more than 100GB typical, and those who care about storage can get 1T or more, very easily.
whats 200MB of gnome libraries?
Name one app that doesn't work on
1. GNOME
2. KDE
3. LXDE
4. Cinnamon
5. Enlightenment.
I have them ALL installed on my computer, and guess what, merely installing them they ALL show up on lightdm, or most other modern DMs.
you windows brownshirts are as dumb as ever, reading of a placard, isgnoring that most theorhetical bugs in linux aren't a problem. Next you'll complain about compiling for diffrent versions of GLIBC, which has been ABI stable since 4.1, which means all modern distros
The whole interface war has made me a little disenchanted with the distros. I've always liked Ubuntu because I can install my Nvidia driver without having a total meltdown on reboot (I always forget to remove nouveau or something). However, Ubuntu is no longer for me as a straight install. I don't really like Unity because it feels like a mish-mash of Compiz and Gnome Shell. It's also too hard to manage windows with Unity - not without a bunch of PPA's to fix it, that is. In the end, I just switch between Gnome Classic and Gnome Shell. I actually like that I just have to worry about 1 corner in Gnome Shell. Everything is there, and the windows are displayed with very convenient "close" buttons (unlike Unity). Anyway, It's hard to follow these small forks because who knows how long they'll last? Fuduntu was a joke because there wasn't any software for it; it seemed like all the software had to be manually tweaked and put into their private repositories. The same goes for this? Maybe not, since it's still gnome 3 and stuff. At this point though, Gnome Shell offers me the usability features of Compiz (sort of) but none of the slowness and instability of Compiz. Forgive me for rambling, but I'm just sharing my thoughts. I do like Gnome Fallback, but I'm just pessimistic that it's a sustainable effort. It's like swimming up-stream.