Pretty hard to jump in on the mega-thread at this point. But wanted to provide a few notes from my perspective:
* I like the term "fallback mode" better than "classic GNOME" or "GNOME 2" because it doesn't set up the expectation that everything is identical. And there are significant changes - the handling of notifications and the radically different System Settings are probably what people are going to notice most. * The primary point of fallback mode is dealing with virtualization and driver problems. * A secondary point is dealing with old hardware, but we should try to be clear that GNOME 3 is a modern desktop designed for reasonably current hardware. If you are running a r200 on a system you bought in 2003, you are going to be happier with an operating system from that era or perhaps an operating system particularly tuned for old hardware. (It isn't just the desktop components, recent Linux kernels seem to be working less well with rotating disks, etc.) * There will also be some people that want to use gnome-panel because they aren't ready to change. While we want to encourage people who have capable hardware to update and use the new experience, there are multiple advantages to accommodating such users in fallback mode as well rather than telling them to use GNOME 2. - Because we have the ability to change the fallback mode components to interact better with new application (such as by providing transient and resident notifications), we can provide a consistent story to application developers about how their apps work in GNOME. - Providing some changes but not the most intrusive changes will get people on the path to moving to the full GNOME experience. - We don't have to worry about parallel install issues for GNOME libraries. - It reduces pressure on us to provide support for old versions of GNOME. * Because we should be trying to accommodate people that aren't quite ready to change, and because we have a working, tested solution in gnome-panel, I think gnome-panel is far more compelling as a path than something thrown together in a month or so. A quick one-off might be OK if all we were trying to do was to bridge people over until they can download new drivers, but the scope is bigger than that. * If (*if*) it doesn't suck up a lot of developer time, I don't see any harm in continuing to provide gnome-applets. Yes, I suppose it could be considered weird if there's a way of adding a pair of eyes to the panel in fallback mode but not in the full GNOME 3 experience, but honestly, if something thinks that their day is not complete without a pair of eyes in their panel, I'd rather let them use fallback mode than argue with them that they are wrong. - Owen _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list