GNOME 3 drops fallback mode in 3.8

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2012-November/msg00009.html

by EdiX • 14 years ago

29 59 14 years ago

mail.gnome.org

mseepgood2• 14 years ago

Makes sense, since no one was interested in maintaining it.

DeepDuh• 14 years ago

I guess on Linux (or any POSIX OS) it's not really necessary, since everything should still be fixable from the terminal. However it reinforces the notion that someone who can't use the terminal (= 99% of users probably) should stick to Windows or Mac - or maybe Ubuntu.

stephen_g• 14 years ago

Well, I think part of the idea is that the fairly recent LLVMPipe software driver [1] should be installed by default in distros and is well supported/performant enough so you can install the drivers in the full composited desktop...

1. http://www.mesa3d.org/llvmpipe.html

brusch• 14 years ago

When installing GNOME3 I had a little chicken-and-egg-problem. Without installing additional drivers GNOME3 wouldn't work, so the fallback mode was handy to search the internet for the correct drivers for my chipset and install them.

But as long as they have some solution for this problem (and I think it is pretty common, because debian always installs with generic drivers for your hardware), I think it is no problem to remove the fallback mode.

Nursie4• 14 years ago

Debian Wheezy will default to XFCE (I think), so you can use that instead of fallback mode for this use case.

You may find you just like using it....

IIRC the reasoning was that GNOME Shell is too big to fit on the default install CD, rather than any idealogical thing.

unwind• 14 years ago

I had to look this up, and it appears in this context, "fallback mode" refers to "sort of a failsafe mode, which should kick in on machines with unsupported graphics cards".

I guess it turns of compositing and such modernities.

http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/3.3/fallback-mode....

reidrac• 14 years ago

There's a follow up to the linked post that explain the cases where Gnome 3 it's not an option and the fallback mode is OK:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2012-November/m...

Basically: some GPU drivers are not good enough to run Gnome (it was way worse about 2 years ago), some old machines can't deal with the software rendering (that is not available for all the platforms, it's only for x86 and ARM -I think-), and there is some performance impact when running 3D apps on Gnome 3 (I've noticed that myself, my laptop fans go berserk!).

Besides the fallback mode was used by some users that were looking for a Gnome 2 alike experience, but apparently that was not the reason of fallback mode to exist.

bkor10• 14 years ago

The idea is that by dropping fallback, people can change gnome-panel and metacity as they wish. Meaning: making it work (and look) more like GNOME 2.

I'm not sure if this is entirely feasible in practice. Actually fallback mode consist of various changes in loads of projects. I'm guessing it'll be broken pretty quickly in GNOME 3.7.x. The intention was still that you could still get a more GNOME 2 experience by not needing gnome-panel+metacity for fallback mode... but after all the investigations, not sure if that can still be achieved.

jhealy• 14 years ago

That's a shame. I was opting to use fallback mode so I could continue using gnome without gnome-shell.

When 3.8 hits debian unstable I guess I'll move to a different window manager.

pan69• 14 years ago

Same here. Fallback mode was the only thing that made GNOME 3 usable. The Linux desktop has really died today.

hendi_3• 14 years ago

That's the thing. The GNOME project understands itself more as an OS than just as a "window manager".

Most (not all, but most) of the hate against GNOME 3 is not against GNOME, but against gnome-shell and gnome-control-center. These are just a few (though essential) pieces of the GNOME desktop. If you don't like the shell you can still use GNOME's apps from another WM (Xmonad, sawfish, KWin) or even from another DE (like Xfce).

jlward4th• 14 years ago

Ditto.

antihero• 14 years ago

If you're the sort of person that used fallback mode and hated Gnome Shell, you'd have served yourself well by jumping ship a long time ago.

dsirijus2• 14 years ago

All this bodes well for Xfce, which is already an outstanding effort. Nice to see it included in future releases of Debian as default, for some spotlight.

hendi_3• 14 years ago

This is wrong, see http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/News/2012/20121....

  - Most of GNOME fits onto CD#1 again (network-less installation).
  - LXDE and Xfce now live on separate images.

GNOME was removed from CD1 due to space reasons, but this was only temporarily (they've meanwhile fixed the space issues). That GNOME didn't fit onto CD1 anymore and that Xfce would be the future was big in the news. That this change was reverted some weeks later, and no Xfce isn't even on the first CD, didn't make the news though. Guess that's not as interesting as GNOME-hate.

dsirijus2• 14 years ago

Well, if you had submitted it, I'm sure it would get frontpaged here.

I just really wasn't aware of the revert and the git commit message sounded promising. [1]

[1] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=co...

LukaD2• 14 years ago

All Xfce needs now, is a compositing manager with sync to vblank support to fix those nasty Nvidia tearing issues. Unfortunately the Xfce developers seem to be ignoring this.

quarterto• 14 years ago

You can use Compiz in XFCE, which has reasonably good sync to vblank support.

bni• 14 years ago

So what will people running GNOME in VMware see? GNOME failed to launch?

bkor10• 14 years ago

llvmpipe in case VMware doesn't do 3D accelleration.

Andrex2• 14 years ago

They'll still see Gnome Shell. They added LLVM support for software-rendering about a year ago: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxM...

Fallback Mode was only still in use by people who preferred Gnome 2 and forced it on, everybody else with Gnome 3 saw Gnome Shell.

Per the link, even back then they discussed dropping Fallback Mode after full LLVM had been added:

> "As said by Red Hat's Adam Williamson on the Fedora mailing list, 'That's really a policy decision for the GNOME / Fedora desktop teams, not for ajax. But based on what they've said in the past, I expect that once most hardware that previously needed the fallback mode is covered, fallback mode will die. AIUI, fallback mode isn't meant to be a GNOME 2-by-stealth for Shell refuseniks, it's purely an attempt to accommodate hardware which doesn't support Shell.'"

ibotty• 14 years ago

i wonder if xmonad's Config.Gnome will get ported away from the fallback mode (if this is possible).

gvalkov2• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, gnome-shell desktop components are closely tied to mutter. For example, the fallback gnome-panel [1] and the gnome-shell gnome-panel [2] are two entirely different beasts (same goes for cinnamon, where they've never had a fallback panel to begin with). There's just no way to run mutter and xmonad at the same time.

It is becoming ever so difficult to be an xmonad user who enjoys the occasional niceties of modern desktop environments (panels, widgets etc). The state of component reuse in modern linux DE is just miserable.

Kudos to the KDE people for keeping their desktop 'dissectible' after all this time. I've had great success in using plasma-desktop with xmonad in the past. Unfortunately, KDE looks/feels wrong to me in ways that no theme has ever been able to correct (see [3] [4]). I wish they adopted 'flatter' look & feel guidelines - right now, there is just too much bling, roundedness and qt widget animations for my taste (relying on SVGs for theming plasma is overkill too, imho). I have a lot of gripes (still can't get over Akonadi needing mysql) with KDE, but I really do respect the work they do.

We can't have nice things ...

[1] http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-panel/tree/gnome-panel

[2] http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/tree/js/ui/panel.js

[3] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/KDE_4.png

[4] http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/1.2...

bryanlarsen• 14 years ago

Are you still using plasma-desktop with xmonad? Do you have some pointers on how to do that? As an xmonad user, I'd like to try it out.

aortega5• 14 years ago

This is insane. I dont know who takes decisions in Gnome but has to be fired immediately. Gnome 2 was a nice and fast DE, it ran anywhere, it was great. They made so many bad decisions with Gnome 3, stopped caring for the user long ago and now they code only from themselves.

aw3c2• 14 years ago

Comment 13 on http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rottin... suggests Red Hat is doing Embrace, Extend and Extinguish ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish ).

bkor10• 14 years ago

There are only 2 people of Red Hat on the GNOME release team (team is 9 at the moment). But yeah, due to the sheer amount of manpower that Red Hat spends on maintaining various software projects, their influence of course is pretty great.

But they still have to convince the other GNOME developer community. Decisions are pretty often made in consensus, so they don't override things.

Note that the blog you are linking to gets some things wrong. You have to see some things in context. E.g. a designer is of course going to have a bit of limited view.

The Red Hat people on the release team sometimes "block" a decision made by other Red Hat people; seems like normal commity behaviour to me. Though of course if they all work together, their idea of the best way forward is going to be similar.

bkor10• 14 years ago

I was part of the decision. I'm not sure if you get the concept of volunteers. My influence and decision abilities is not based on "company ideas" as you seem to think.

Meaning: I wasn't hired, I cannot be fired.

PommeDeTerre3• 14 years ago

If I may ask, what is it that drives you to volunteer to work on a project that has so much negativity surrounding it these days?

I've found GNOME 3 to be a very interesting case study. Here we have what was once a very successful project that has gone through a very rough patch lately.

Many existing users aren't happy with what it has become, and although changes are happening, they only seem to be provoking more and more negativity. I can't recall any GNOME 3-related news where the sentiment was positive. At best, it's a sense of "well, things aren't getting any worse!" And while I don't have any numbers, I gather that GNOME 3 isn't really attracting all that many new users, either.

The future doesn't exactly look bright. Based on the comments here regarding this decision, for example, it clearly isn't what the user community wants. There seems to be much more excitement and positivity around projects like MATE and Cinnamon, which basically go against what the GNOME team is doing.

I don't mean to be insulting, but I have a very difficult time understanding why anyone would still want to be publicly associated with the GNOME project these days.

abenga• 14 years ago

Just to ensure that complaints are not the only opinions developers like you hear, let me tell you that I use Gnome Shell everyday, and I love it. I migrated a lot of the people in our office (a small Actuarial firm w. ~12 people) to it and everyone likes it.

buster• 14 years ago

Drop the fallback mode if it means better quality of the rest. Seriously, Gnome Shell runs fine on my Intel integrated graphics, i suppose it runs fine on nvidia and amd as well, so why fallback mode anyway.

How about communicating to distributions to fallback to gnome2 or xfce or something similar as a recommendation?

stusmall• 14 years ago

I just wanted to be another person to chime and say I enjoy gnome3. Sometimes a good product is best when you build it for yourself instead of trying to please others.

Thanks!

aortega5• 14 years ago

> Meaning: I wasn't hired, I cannot be fired.

Oh I see the problem then. Dude please reconsider it. Do you ever tried to run that stupid LLVM-pipe stuff in a VM? it's impossible, and I have a nice machine. ARM? MIPS? Sparc? forget it.

JulianMorrison• 14 years ago

Mate Desktop is a fork/rename/continuation of Gnome 2.

z3phyr• 14 years ago

Xmonad withought a de, thats my cup of tea nowadays. I am content.

dysoco• 14 years ago

I hate GNOME 3, but I agree with this move. If you like classic desktops, and you have been using Gnome-Fallback you are doing it wrong: GNOME 3 is designed to be used with the Gnome-Shell.

XFCE and Mate are both excellent Desktop Environments which follow a "classic" approach. (Or you can try KDE too).

gosub• 14 years ago

For a brief period of time, I used Fedora and Gnome3. Having a radeon hd46XX, gnome refused to display anything properly, except in fallback-mode. I think this should be its use: not a UX choice, but a mode for when graphic acceleration fails.

GNOME 3 drops fallback mode in 3.8

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