Re: future of GNOME Flashback and GNOME-2-related packages?
On Thu, 07 Apr 2016 at 10:39:41 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> BTW, is gnome-shell classic mode still going to be available upstream?
GNOME 3.20's gnome-shell-extensions still has it. I can't say for sure
whether it will be in 3.22 (which is probably what stretch will release
with) but I'm not aware of any reason why it would be removed.
To be completely clear about this, there are three levels of GNOMEness
in recent/future Debian:
* GNOME 3 as intended by upstream, the default in Debian 7/8/testing:
the one with the black bar at the top, using GNOME 3 technology to
provide the GNOME 3 UX design
* GNOME Classic, available since Debian 8: using GNOME 3 technology
(GNOME Shell plus some extensions) to provide a UX design superficially
similar to GNOME 2
* GNOME Flashback (previously Fallback, confusingly labelled "Classic"
in Debian 7): using a mixture of GNOME 2 and 3 technology to get
a UX somewhere between GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 on weaker systems.
This used to be run by GNOME 3 as a fallback on systems with no
hardware 3D, but now GNOME 3 relies on llvmpipe to provide
"good enough" software compositing instead.
The one I'm concerned about here is Flashback, because that depends on
components that are essentially dead upstream (but with names that could
mislead users into thinking they are still a required component for
GNOME), and there are actively-developed forks with their own upstream
developers (MATE, Cinnamon) which might be a better choice now.
S
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