Re: My thoughts on fallback mode

[Mario Blättermann <mariobl gnome org>]

Am Montag, den 03.01.2011, 13:37 -0500 schrieb Owen Taylor:
> There will also be some people that want to use gnome-panel because
>    they aren't ready to change. While we want to encourage people who
>    have capable hardware to update and use the new experience, there
>    are multiple advantages to accommodating such users in fallback
>    mode as well rather than telling them to use GNOME 2. 

Im afraid we will have a lot of more people who use the "fallback mode"
or "classic mode" than the new desktop shell. Keep in mind, a Linux or
BSD distribution will be installed on older hardware in many cases,
because the newest Windows doesn't run properly anymore. On my five
years old IBM Thinkpad T41 with ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 I cannot use
gnome-shell. Only black windows... On the other hand, Compiz with most
of its nice features works fine. That's why we *must* provide an
appropriate clutter-less fallback mode for the GNOME 3 lifecycle (yes,
for the whole cycle!). What about to have a gnome-shell with a fallback
mode which works (with function constraints) with the good old metacity
or other window managers? And keeping gnome-applets as
gnome-shell-applets? Otherwise, we will get rid of a lot of users.

>From the current point of view, the GNOME v3.0 desktop seems to become
no more than a kind of technology preview with a lot of gaps. In fact, a
disaster for the user, like KDE 4.0, in comparison with the stable and
mature GNOME 2. What's the function of version numbers, actually...?
It's odd to ship such an almost unusable stuff and mark it as stable,
referring to future versions which will probably fix the problems. Here
I speak about the goal to make the gnome-shell including clutter the
centre of all development efforts, not about the other new parts such as
gsettings, new docs appearance, gtkbuilder and many more. I'm afraid
that the users won't honour the "gnomeshellmania".

Cheers,
Mario