Fedora Clarifies Stance On Forks Like Cinnamon, Mate

[drago01]

A fork is something that you use instead of the original. You now use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice, thus LibreOffice is a fork. Cinnamon, on the other hand, is something you use as well as Gnome 3. Cinnamon cannot exist without Gnome 3 and they move into the future in parallel.

Call it a fork if you want - it is just words. Cinnamon exists, and a lot of people like it.

Again it is a fork. They took the code into a new repo; renamed it and are adding modifications that are not in the original and are doing there own releases.

Whether it uses the same infrastructure as GNOME3 or not does not really matter.

[elanthis]

Gnome 2 is not dead. Red hat will be maintaining it for many years in RHEL (they recently extended support, End of Extended Life Cycle for RHEL6 is 2023).

That support is VERY limited. It basically only means that if some serious flaw is found, it'll be patched. Zero new features will be added. Zero work will be put in to making it work with newer desktop technologies like Wayland or systemd or so on which also will not ever be found in the versions of RHEL shipping with GNOME 2. GNOME 2 is dead.

If you consider gnome 2 to be obsolete and old fashioned there are a lot of other window managers that can be dropped out of distros. If TWM still has a place, then i would say gnome 2 does.

If you are willing to spend the time and effort to maintain the GNOME 2 packages and make sure that installing them does not conflict with the GNOME 3 packages, then yes, they can be kept.

As is, keeping GNOME 2 packaged and working and up-to-date with various other distro changes requires a crapload more work than keeping TWM.

[ssam]

Also MATE is picking up some new features, such as undo-redo in the file browser :-)

https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-file-manager/commit/cdd4cad2ce3930bf1d484ab12371a5d6a354ea00