Gnome 3 and the future of the default Debian Desktop

[Joe Neal <vlvtelvis@speakeasy.net>]

Hello All

First off I don't intend this as flamebait and hope it will not be taken as 
such.  I'm just a long-term Debian user looking to bring a topic up for 
discussion.

At issue is the apropriateness of a desktop that refuses to run on a vast 
ammont of graphics hardware as the default for The Universal Operating System.

I just downloaded the Fedora based Gnome 3 live CD and gave it a try on the 
various machines around the house.  Gnome Shell was slow with Nouveau on two 
relatively modern machines in the house.  Gnome Shell failed to work at all on 
an old Thinkpad with Savage graphics.  I'm sure it will work better on the 
Nvidia machines with the propritary drivers or with some time given for 
further development on both Gnome Shell and the Nouveau drivers.  For the old 
Thinkpad, I doubt it ever will. 

Even if free drivers for platforms that support display compositing are up to 
snuff by the time of the next release, what about platforms that never 
supported it and never will?  Display compositing is pretty much limited to 
AMD64, x86 and some later PPCs isn't it? 

How many of the following support display compositing as required by Gnome 
Shell?

* kFreeBSD
* KVM (Debian's prefered virtualization solution if I'm not mistaken) and 
other VMs
* Various ARM tablets and notebooks
* other archetectures that have their own graphics hardware with no 
compositing support

I'm not going to come out saying that switching to KDE or XFCE or LXDE or any 
othe solution would be preferable, or even that continuing to use Gnome isn't 
preferable.  I'd just like to see this given some thought and discussion.

Again, I've seen enough flaming on this subject and don't want to contribute to 
starting any more.

thanks,

JN.