GNOME 3.8 Is Dropping Its Fallback Mode

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME 3.8 Is Dropping Its Fallback Mode

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 that allowed a "GNOME classic" mode that didn't depend upon OpenGL/3D rendering and was more like the GNOME2 traitional desktop...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTIyNTE

[matyas]

IMO, it's a positive sign that the GNOME fellows are going for better quality regarding their vision of an fancy 3D accelerated desktop (similarly to Unity).
Users who like the traditional efficient interface (a taskbar allowing to switch to any application anytime with a single click) have great options like lxde and xfce.
They are truly mature desktop environments:
- very stable due to multiple years of bugfixes
- customizable
- efficient resource usage (memory footprint, gpu)
- proven desktop model for the Desktop user

Those who like the fancy and shiny new stuff should go Unity, GNOME and they pay certain price in terms of perhaps more bugs and certain resource requirements (e.g. GPU).
There's enough goodness left for those who stick with the more traditional UI.

[mayankleoboy1]

I agree. People who want shiny stuff, should be able to afford more CPU/GPU usage.
Its not fair on devs to continue spending more and more time to make old things shiny while using the same resources as old.


Of course, Gnome3/Unity is for shiny and stupids :P
I prefer cinammon

[mark45]

If one doesn't have money (or whatever) to update one's old/shitty graphics card once in like 7 years then not being able to update to Gnome 3.8 must be the least of one's problems.

The gnome devs made (this time) a wise and future-oriented decision.

[ssam]

i have a ~3 year old netbook, with a 945GME. this chipset can only do textures up to 2048x2048. so it can't render a composited desktop if i plug in a second monitor and arrange it to the side. 32bit intel atom is not exactly what LLVMpipe is designed for.

I prefer gnome2/mate anyway, so no great loss to me.

[Ares Drake]

old/shitty graphics card

It also affects VMs, ARM based PCs, live-CDs without propietary drivers and network screensharing.

Why not just abandon the whole Gnome project as well? The three users left would probably not mind much...

[BO$$]

See this is the problem with both canonical and gnome and other open source idiot devs. They say they will create something new and they do that while saying they will also maintain the older version. After releasing the new version they realize that maintaining the previous version is actually work and it's boring since you don't add stuff but fix bugs so they justify it and no longer maintain it. This is what is fucked up. They supported it until now and now they got bored. This is what is wrong in open source. Nobody wants to do what is neccessary, only what is cool. And apparentely that shitty gnome shell is cool for now. Just wait a few years when they'll say that gnome shell is shit and move on to some other bullshit desktop.

[zxy_thf]

It also affects VMs, ARM based PCs, live-CDs without propietary drivers and network screensharing.

Why not just abandon the whole Gnome project as well? The three users left would probably not mind much...

Gnome (as well as KDE and Unity) guys are still working towards modern desktop (fully hw-accel, composing GUI), while many opponents even don't know what they are saying!

[pingufunkybeat]

This is what is wrong in open source. Nobody wants to do what is neccessary, only what is cool.

I agree!

So... what are you doing about it?

[Licaon]

Gnome (as well as KDE and Unity) guys are still working towards modern desktop (fully hw-accel, composing GUI), while many opponents even don't know what they are saying!

Oh yeah? https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012...ing-in-threes/ Riiiiiiggggghhhtttt!

Looks like I made the smart move switching to i3 ( http://www.i3wm.org/ ) 2 months ago, although to be fair, KDE3 and >4.2.0 served me pretty good, but what do I know, my desktop looked like this ( http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/5...anoua00031.jpg ) no matter what WM/DE.