A Fork Of GNOME 2: The Mate Desktop

[_cas_]

I don't think that this project is necessary. Fallback mode is more-or-less gnome-2, albeit with a few bits of horribleness. They should focus on fixing the horribleness rather than maintaining something that is obsolete.

yep, couldn't agree more. I still run gnome2 & openbox at home, but I've been running my work desktop machine with gnome 3 in fallback mode (with openbox as window manager) for about 2 months now. The Gnome Shell is ghastly. Fallback mode is almost OK.

If the panel was fixed (mostly get rid of the stupid hard-coded 3 regions and let me put launchers where *I* want them and stopped wasting precious panel space reminding me what my name is), i'd be reasonably happy switching to Gnome 3 Fallback at home. Also, I want my applets. And I want the clock on the far right of the top menu, not in the middle of the screen. and i want the systray on the far right of the bottom panel, right next to my desktop pager.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised to see that the "Always Group Windows" option was still available in the task bar....the other panels i've tried (incl. xfce, lxpanel) don't have that feature, so they're useless to me.

Given what Gnome devs have said on the subject, though, I suspect that someone will have to fork the fallback mode. Gnome seems to want it to die off.

The nice thing about gnome-shell is that its entirely themable,

I guess theming is important if you care about that kind of thing. I don't very much. I just want a convenient way of launching common apps and displaying various status applets about my system. I don't care much what it looks like as long as it isn't garish, doesn't have distracting animations, and doesn't get in my way.

so you really could make it look totally like gnome-2 while still being gnome-shell.

Fallback mode kind of does that in an almost-but-not-quite adequate way. At least with openbox as the window manager (haven't tried mutter. have no intention of ever doing so).

Oh, and quite emulating apple with the settings menus. Every time I see that, I barf a little bit.

I can't stand seeing my name as a menu (really, i know my name. I've known it for over 40 years. I don't need reminding and my ego can stand a few minutes of not seeing it in writing). it took me almost a day to even figure out that it was a menu and that's where they were hiding the logout and settings options.

And WTF are those Busy / Available menu options? What do they actually *DO*? What programs do they interact with?

I presume they're for some instant-chat type thing, but my instant reaction was that it's some kind of Big Brother spyware reporting my activities to someone, somewhere. Why the hell is some application so privileged that it gets to occupy my menus when I don't even use any chat programs. And even if i did use software like that I wouldn't want it integrated into my desktop (that just creeps me out), I'd want it as a completely isolated app that i could start up and quit when *I* wanted.

[liam]

Really, though, wanting the old experience back is not that great. The old experience _was_ tried, and dried up, and kind of at a dead-end.

The problem that I and many others have with GNOME 3 is not even so much the big redesign, but just that the new design sucks. There's a bazillion things in GNOME 2 that drove me up a wall and I wished I had the time to just gut and replace to be less retarded, but at the end of the day, GNOME 2 never got in my way the way GNOME 3 does.

Just maintaining GNOME 2 is kinda worthless. Taking Fallback Mode components and continuing heavy development on them is more interesting, assuming you don't butt heads with the GNOME 3 designers trying to gut said components. Really, though, the old panel sucked (way over-configurable, confusing, and missing several really awesome features like a window list design that didn't come straight out of the 90s -- take a hint from Win7 or OS X at the very least),

OS X? I really don't think a dock is the way to go, especially as OS X implemented it (haven't tried Lion, so maybe it has changed).
IMHO, the alt-tab of Gnome 3 is CLOSE to perfect (combination of fast application recognition with the logos/names and then previews of the windows offers a really nice way of navigating -- even being able to combine it with the mouse makes the feature even better).
If you want something Win7 like, and you're using Gnome, you can try DockBarX. I just installed it yesterday and I think it is quite well done. I don't actually use it that much because going to overview/alt-tab is so quick, but if you want a dynamic dock that is light and configurable, it is quite nice.

Metacity got left behind (no real compositor, and compositing is important for basic desktop apps to actually work in many cases these days), Nautilus is clunky and missing most useful features a good filemanager should have (by design, according to all the WONTFIX bug reports I filed, unfortunately), the Control Center was always ugly and missing a ton of options and hard to navigate, etc.

A new GNOME was a great idea. A new GNOME that makes window management impossible and which is written in JavaScript, however, is not at all a good idea.

Metacity has compositing, but if you mean it doesn't use opengl, I don't see that as meaning it isn't a compositor.
Nautilus is clunky/ugly and missing some features. I think Dolphin is the best file manager I've seen, while PCManFM is the fastest. Control center isn't great looking, but is easier to navigate than KDE's mess. I had some ideas for the CC but some of those designers are just enamoured with OSX.
The JS aspect of Gnome is great. Mutter works really well and since so much work is being put into JS engines, the performance is only going to get better. Besides, I just tried the upcoming Mutter with an early fedora build and was surprised at how much smoother it was. I don't really know what they did b/c Mutter look perfectly smooth on 3.0, but 3.2 is utterly buttery on 4500MHD. Something I should've looked for was if they fixed the long standing aliasing problem on window borders. I don't think so since I think I would've heard about it but still, it's possible it got pushed through with little notice.

[kraftman]

Huh? Every single useful kde application is a gnome application that the user doesn't know is a gnome application.

Which one? Firefox, Gimp? They're not Gnome applications. There are high quality KDE apps where Gnome equivalents doesn't even exist - Digikam, Amarok, Marble and Plasma, of course.

Those who use KDE still must have a whole slew of gnome installed for basic functionality -- not a dependency of KDE, but a dependency of most of the software they need to run. So my basic question is this; why bother installing kde bloat when you need gnome anyway? kde doesn't actually offer anything besides their (very ugly) menus.

You've got to be kidding. I don't need a single crap from gnome to use KDE (Check Chakra Linux). KDE does offer much more powerful DE and applications and it's based on much more interesting toolkit. Its interface is not screwed like gnome 3 and there's no need for gnome dependencies.

[TheBlackCat]

Huh? Every single useful kde application is a gnome application that the user doesn't know is a gnome application.

Thank you for proving my point.

[V!NCENT]

That's a very over simplistic look at it. Forget about the UI, look at the underlying infrastructure that is behind every DE. With KDE, you can strip out every bit of it and every bit of underlying infrastructure and not really notice (because nothing really useful depends on it).

Errrr... What? Did you actually follow development of KDE4 and its components?

Those who use KDE still must have a whole slew of gnome installed for basic functionality -- not a dependency of KDE, but a dependency of most of the software they need to run. So my basic question is this; why bother installing kde bloat when you need gnome anyway? kde doesn't actually offer anything besides their (very ugly) menus.

What Gnome software? GTK+ software you mean? Like what software? I only use Qt apps...

And FYI: similar reason to something I mentioned in my previous post... I don't want to make gnome-shell look like gnome-panel (even if it can be done) because it depends on mutter (compositing bloat nonsense). I don't want that compositing.

Why wouldn't you want compositing? The 3D effects or the technique of multiple buffers?

[droidhacker]

Wait, you claim there is not a single useful KDE application, yet turn around and tell someone else to not be an asshole? Are you kidding me?

Huh? Every single useful kde application is a gnome application that the user doesn't know is a gnome application.

[TheBlackCat]

Chill out.
No need to be an asshole over this.

Wait, you claim there is not a single useful KDE application, yet turn around and tell someone else to not be an asshole? Are you kidding me?

[droidhacker]

Don't fucking lecture me of all people on the importance of consistent user-interfaces and avoiding unnecessary change. Really.

Adding features is important. Especially considering that GNOME 2 was missing a gigantic freaking swath of necessary features to make it actually bearable to use for anyone who wasn't weened on a terminal. Compared to an OS like Windows 7, GNOME 2 is utter crap. The problem is not the desire to improve and evolve the desktop, but the fact that the GNOME people didn't _evolve_ the deesktop -- they rewrote it half from scratch, redesigned it entirely from scratch, etc. If you want "mature" with no new features and no improvements ever, you might as well load up twm and quit bitching about DE's at all.

GNOME 3 needed to exist. It just needed to exist as GNOME 2 + Lots of Improvements, rather than to exist as iOS + WTF.

Chill out.
No need to be an asshole over this.

As far as comparing gnome2 with MicropieceofShit7.... a wooden spoon and a bucket of piss is a better user experience than MicropieceofShit7. Gnome2 is *FAR* from utter crap. Its far more productive, predictable, and intuitive than anything MS or their assbitch Apple have *EVER* come up with. And that's even if you stick it in front of someone who has only ever used microapple.

[elanthis]

I agree, the experience was mature, which is why a number of people wanted to maintain the experience. It's a concept foreign to most Open Source projects but there is room for maintaining a stable code base by fixing bugs and not adding features. I know, I know, it's not the "sexy" thing to do. It's called using the computer, not fighting it. .

Don't fucking lecture me of all people on the importance of consistent user-interfaces and avoiding unnecessary change. Really.

Adding features is important. Especially considering that GNOME 2 was missing a gigantic freaking swath of necessary features to make it actually bearable to use for anyone who wasn't weened on a terminal. Compared to an OS like Windows 7, GNOME 2 is utter crap. The problem is not the desire to improve and evolve the desktop, but the fact that the GNOME people didn't _evolve_ the deesktop -- they rewrote it half from scratch, redesigned it entirely from scratch, etc. If you want "mature" with no new features and no improvements ever, you might as well load up twm and quit bitching about DE's at all.

GNOME 3 needed to exist. It just needed to exist as GNOME 2 + Lots of Improvements, rather than to exist as iOS + WTF.

[droidhacker]

If that's the only point, then why don't KDE3 lovers just make KDE4 behave like KDE3? It's not as if the old theme's, desktop behavior, old AmaroK interface and old kicker isn't available for KDE4...

That said, Plasma can easily be configured to work the same as Gnome 2, while being technologicaly better. I'd say you need a 'whopping' 2 months to hack and slash KDE4 into a Gnome 2-panel desktop, but with way better technology. In fact: the very purpose of Plasma was to be a canvas for desktops. I don't mean changing panel behavior; I mean creating new ones. Then strip away various options related to KDE4 and you have Gnome 2 classic. Because what exactly is Gnome 2? A couple of menu's, panels and tiny config widgets. That's pretty much it...

That's a very over simplistic look at it. Forget about the UI, look at the underlying infrastructure that is behind every DE. With KDE, you can strip out every bit of it and every bit of underlying infrastructure and not really notice (because nothing really useful depends on it), but strip out gnome and all of its infrastructure and you might as well power down. Those who use KDE still must have a whole slew of gnome installed for basic functionality -- not a dependency of KDE, but a dependency of most of the software they need to run. So my basic question is this; why bother installing kde bloat when you need gnome anyway? kde doesn't actually offer anything besides their (very ugly) menus.

And FYI: similar reason to something I mentioned in my previous post... I don't want to make gnome-shell look like gnome-panel (even if it can be done) because it depends on mutter (compositing bloat nonsense). I don't want that compositing.