Re: The desktop in Gnome 3

[Jason Clinton <me jasonclinton com>]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 13:31, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:

However, there is a problem. The gnome-shell replacement stuff is all
mockups and ideas, and we're a few months from Gnome 3.0. There are
plans to start implementing this soon, but its unlikely that what we get
by Gnome 3.0 time is super-polished.

So, we have two options:

1) Remove the desktop in 3.0 and have the not-quiet-polished gnome-shell
feature as the only way to handle transient files.

2) Keep the desktop in 3.0, in addition to the gnome-shell feature, and
then drop it in 3.2 when the shell is more polished.

Neither of these are ideal. Really, the time to change the user
experience is in 3.0, but not having a feature complete replacement is
kinda sucky for users.

I'm not sure what is the best way forward here. But my current plan is
to leave the desktop enabled while work on the gnome-shell feature
starts. Then we can delay the decision until a date closer to the Gnome
3.0 release when we know better what the status of the shell work is.

This topic dovetails nicely with an issue that we haven't discussed yet which is the 3.0 draft schedule.

The marketing team needs at least two months to get all of our 3.0 launch videos and promotions done so I was going to ask that we extend the UI freeze period by 2 weeks. That means that 3.0's UI would freeze in a little over 4 months from now.

If there's not enough time to feature-complete the UI in that time, then kicking it back to 3.2 would definitely be the preferred option. Or drop-kicking 3.0 back another 6 months to Fall 2011--we do not want to repeat KDE 4.0. "The cool stuff isn't done yet," is not a notion we want people to think about 3.0.

In summary, if it can't be feature complete in four months, I would prefer moving 3.0 back to Fall 2011.