Re: Fallback / Classic Mode

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 13:16, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:
>> It appears you're happy telling people what to concentrate on, all I'm
>> saying is that I'm not.
> 
> I would appreciate it if you would avoid ascribing me to certain
> positions that I am not taking.

I shouldn't have reacted provocatively. I took your initial response to
mean "don't waste your time on this". Which, obviously, is telling me
what I should spend time on.

>> But I bet that this will be an issue, and it's
>> one we can handle easily with a tiny bit of foresight.
> 
> There is no issue because we planned for a Fallback Mode in 3.0 from
> the beginning and it is implemented (modulo some bugs that need to be
> squashed before release.)

Surely you can accept that there is an image formed in the mind of
people about GNOME 3, and we need to handle the expectations people have
about the release?

> GNOME 3 is *not* GNOME Shell. I'm disheartened that you are this
> misinformed as a regular reader of this mailing list and a blogger on
> Planet GNOME. Frankly, I don't know what else we could have done to
> better inform you but if you have a suggestion as to how it is that
> you came to be so misguided and what we could have done to reach out
> to you earlier, that would certainly help this marketing process.

Thank you for the lesson. As a "misinformed", "misguided" contributor,
I'm trying hard not to get too upset with your reaction. I hope you will
react differentlyt post-release with misinformed & misguided users & press.


In the minds of a lot of people (press and GNOME hackers, and by proxy,
future users), GNOME 3 is very much the user experience defined by GNOME
Shell. And, while I don't have any data to back this up, I'd bet that
people are expecting "GNOME 3 fall-back mode" to be more or less
equivalent to GNOME 2.

So since (a) in some situations using GNOME 3 in "normal" mode (with
GNOME Shell) is not appropriate, and (b) GNOME fall-back does not
provide the same user experience as GNOME 2, we risk disappointing some
people doubly, if we do not prepare ourselves to manage these expectations.

That means, IMHO, figuring out some situations when it's inappropriate
to run GNOME Shell, documenting how to manually switch to fall-back mode
if, for example, your card is detected as being Shell capable, but runs
slowly (I had this experience on one SiS chipset on a netbook), and also
managing people's expectations about GNOME Fallback's feature set.

I hope I've managed to clear up any confusion about my position, and my
interests in holding that position.


The sad thing is that we've spent longer arguing about this than it
would have taken to document the few situations where using Shell is not
appropriate, and making recommendations to users as to what we suggest
they do in these situations.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org