Re: [Usability] Fork request by Linus Torvlads

[Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl>]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 08:17:57AM -0600, Ted Pomeroy wrote:
> Dear Gnome, I have seen the fork request by Linus Torvalds and I
> agree. I am a happy user of Gnome 2.30.2 and wonder why the

Linus did not make any fork request. He only indicated he was unhappy.
Some blogs tried to get a lot of hits by misrepresenting this as a call
for fork', but that is not the case.

> "innovation" is driving Gnome away from the principles of user ease
> and user choice. For instance, I change the start up music, because I
> can, I keep my desktop neat, because I can and use the drop-down menus
> because they are clear and complete (and I can modify them to hide
> unwanted application links).  Note, I also tend to use older hardware
> because I am on a budget and I love to tell people, "I take a 3-10
> year old computer that MS Windows cannot run on and make it a
> delightful and FULL functioning tool."

3-5 year old hardware should work fine, minor driver issues. Driver
issues should be fixed by the kernel, which is maintained by various
people (not just Linus).
Anything older than 5 years I'd recommend staying with an older GNOME
version.

Anyway, I don't see anything concrete in here. If you want to fork
GNOME, feel free. The code is hosted on git.gnome.org.

Practically, there is a GNOME fallback mode which gives you a GNOME
panel and various applets are back in 3.2.
-- 
Regards,
Olav