GNOME 3.7.2 Kills The GNOME Fallback Mode

The GNOME 3.7.2 development release was made available today. The two major changes with this latest GNOME 3.8 pre-release is the elimination of the GNOME Fallback (non-Shell) mode and now depending exclusively upon GStreamer 1.0.

We have known that GNOME would be removing its fallback mode that makes GNOME 3.x more like the GNOME2 environment and doesn't depend upon 3D acceleration, but the GNOME 3.7.2 release is where the removal happened. There's still developers calling for a fork of the GNOME fallback mode and other developers are looking at bringing GNOME 2.x features to GNOME 3.x, but none of that happened within GNOME 3.7.2.

The other change is that GNOME 3.7.2 now depends only upon GStreamer 1.0 with all of the GNOME packages having been migrated to the 1.0 APIs from the pre-1.0 GStreamer state. GStreamer 1.0 was released in late September and some packages began migrating to this official multimedia framework release in GNOME 3.6.

The GNOME 3.7.2 release announcement can be found on the GNOME mailing list.

Other features coming to GNOME 3.8 are covered in this article. If you haven't participated already, be sure to take part in the 2012 GNOME User Survey.