Re: Metacity, Mutter, GNOME Shell, GNOME-2.28

[Tomas Frydrych <tf linux intel com>]

Josselin Mouette wrote:
> I don’t think maintaining a few more packages (especially packages that
> already exist today) is a big effort. But it stills bother me if we are
> going to propose two entirely different user experiences with two
> different configurations. For the end user, it will just feel like we
> are shipping two desktop environments.

I think that is a wrong way of looking at it; we are going to be
shipping one, unified desktop environment with a particular set of HW
requirements. In addition to this it will be possible to downgrade this
to the older Gnome desktop environment for legacy HW that does not meet
the requirements.

My concern is that as long as we are going to allow significantly
*outdated* HW capabilities to dictate the *future* direction of GNOME,
we stand no chance of making GNOME into a platform of choice for the
mainstream user. There are good reasons to provide legacy support, and
it's great to be able to run GNOME on a machine that is 5 years old, but
it must be seen for what it is -- legacy support, it cannot be where the
collective effort of GNOME should be concentrated.

Tomas