Re: Dropping fallback mode in 3.8

[Ma Xiaojun <damage3025 gmail com>]

Though it seems hopeless to change the decision, I find some tendency annoying.

1. I have a machine that works well.
If you seriously believe they will work for most machines. Let me do a
serious statistics to prove or disprove your claim.
But my intuition is that it is generally harder to properly utilize
graphic hardware on Linux than that of some years ago (I start messing
with Linux since old Red Hat Linux 8.0). For example, the annoying
switchable graphics. On the other hand, desktop environments are more
dependent on OpenGL. So it's harder from both sides, so sad.

2. Folks can use LLVMpipe.
It slow down the machine anyway, sometimes you can really measure it.
What about laptop's battery life? An interesting observation is that
Linux newbies sometimes try hard to increse battery life on Linux
while Linux veteran sometimes just accept the fact running Linux means
shorter battery life.

3. You can still use GNOME 2.
If the user don't care about recent graphical apps, it's fine. Though
Ubuntu 10.04 is going to EOL next year, we still have CentOS. If you
do care, then I'd say it's a lot easier installing GIMP 2.8, Lib 3.6,
... on Redmond XP (EOL 2014) than remaining old distribution releases
featuring GNOME 2.
As Fedora already trying to package MATE, Debian/Ubuntu guys may
follow up the track. Though I'm not sure will Fedora 18 ever release.

4. It's free software. You can contribute.
I believe very very few people can ever become a develop and only few
of them will spend time writing patch, try contacting developer, ...
I think the most reasonable contribution a general user can make is
that she can point out problems she met in various channels.
Ever since the introduction of GNOME 3, I guess most common responses
users get are "We know better." I don't want comment particular cases
but I wonder have you ever tried informing users? Probably you made
some decisions on a public IRC / mailing list so you think it is
enough?
On bugzilla, bugs just pile up. That's users' contribution also. But I
haven't seen any major attempt to clean these bugs up and solving real
problems. What's interesting about a new release that ports to Python
3 and drops Fallback mode?