GNOME 3 To Support a "Classic" Mode, of Sorts 197
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!'"
This isn't devs listening (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Summary wrong (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Good decission (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway there is no reason for "classic" extensions to be so limited. GNOME Shell is like Firefox in that new functionality can be strapped onto it and appear seamless. Any extension could potentially change the look and feel of the shell in quite radical ways. That's all Mint are doing after all with MGSE.
Re:Hell must be freezing over (Score:3, Informative)
The "Linux Mint" guys haven't done much work. Most of the JavaScript extensions that make up Cinnamon aren't primarily developed by anyone associated with Linux Mint and Mate is basically Gnome 2 with a few minor patches.
Re:Good decission (Score:4, Informative)
Here's the problem with extensions: too many changes between Gnome releases means that many extensions break from version to version necessitating extension writers having to maintain multiple versions to support multiple distros. Add the fact that the Gnome devs rarely communicate these changes until maybe right before, or just after a new release, and are notoriously indifferent to the breakage they cause, has led to developers turning away from writing extensions altogether. And let's not get into how they routinely fuck with people trying to create themes for Gnome3.
Re:Good decission (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Pfft (Score:4, Informative)
"we should not fault people who prefer the old way"
Oooh, how generously big-hearted and inclusive of them!
Yes, it does come across as... diplomatically condescending. Especially in context:-
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.
Yep, it's just that the users who preferred the old interface have been too old and stuck in their ways to bother with a "short learning phase".