Re: gnome-panel & gnome-applets?

["Jason D. Clinton" <me jasonclinton com>]

On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 12:54, Carlos Garcia Campos <carlosgc gnome org> wrote:

I disagree. If I run gnome-session with the classic mode I expect to
see exactly what I have right now, with all the applets. The
definition of essential applet is probably different for every user.

I am not a designer but I've been paying attention to this process for about 1.5 years now so I think I can address your concerns.

We are on the path of ending the insanity of behavior customization with GNOME 3 (though all are welcome to help with the maintenance of the gnome-applets module, of course.) Obviously, personalization is staying (wallpaper, themes, cursors, sounds, preferences). In GNOME 3, the objective is create a desktop that actually works out of the box; one that doesn't require that you help your family members fiddle with a bunch of settings before it's a tolerable experience. (For example, the very first thing I kill is the workspace switcher and show desktop applets because no family member can comprehend looking at them to figure out where all their windows just went after they accidentally click them. In Shell these are replaced with the same features but in a way which has an actual usable UI.)

This means stopping the abuse of applets which in some cases are stand-ins for something that should be a "desktop widget" (Finance and Deskbar, for example)[1] and in other cases are horrible hacks that try to "fix" bad design elsewhere in the OS (battery charge applet predates g-p-m, for example). Others are just a pointless toys which are maintenance burden. In most cases the outcome will be that some combination of the legacy notification area icons and essential applets will provide access to hardware-related and session-related functions in the order and locations they located in the Shell design. Clearly, network, keyboard, power, a11y, sound, bluetooth, system, applications and clock are staying. Probably launchers. Places is a long-term unknown. There are going to be others; the list is still a work in-progress.
 

GNOME 2 fallback experience should be gnome-panel, metacity and
gnome-applets.

It's a fallback but it's also going in to long-term maintenance mode which means we need to have a coherent experience between the "compatible" and Shell desktop environments. And they need to continue to adapt to API changes. Try to imagine the next major vertical hardware integration to come along, say, for example, that we get a desktop-wide, WiFi supported, geolocation API with privacy guards. Now we have to write a geolocation indicator and UI for both shells. (Just speculating.)

We're planning for the future here and for one in which everyone has a good experience without having to muck around.

[1] There are no shortage of projects which try to do exactly this. See Docky, Avant, Google Desktop, etc.