Re: My thoughts on fallback mode

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

2011/1/3 Mario Blättermann <mariobl gnome org>

Am Montag, den 03.01.2011, 13:37 -0500 schrieb Owen Taylor:

> 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.

Im afraid we will have a lot of more people who use the "fallback mode"
or "classic mode" than the new desktop shell. Keep in mind, a Linux or
BSD distribution will be installed on older hardware in many cases,
because the newest Windows doesn't run properly anymore. On my five
years old IBM Thinkpad T41 with ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 I cannot use
gnome-shell. Only black windows... On the other hand, Compiz with most
of its nice features works fine. That's why we *must* provide an
appropriate clutter-less fallback mode for the GNOME 3 lifecycle (yes,
for the whole cycle!). What about to have a gnome-shell with a fallback
mode which works (with function constraints) with the good old metacity
or other window managers? And keeping gnome-applets as
gnome-shell-applets? Otherwise, we will get rid of a lot of users.

Gosh, so you believe that the majority of the Linux desktop market consists of old platforms?  Gnome-shell should work on any machine that is about 5 years old.  After that even things like flash and web browsers are going to be dog slow.  You simply would not use the primary application, the Internet in any appreciable fashion.  Hopefully, said users are not some  old grey beard still running around using gopher, and lynx to browse the web. :-)
 
I think if compiz works then we should be able to do it with clutter.  As I said in another thread, nautilus during the initial 2.0 was pretty damn slow and over several iterations finally became the speed demon it is today.  Don't expect things to be perfect from the get go.  That's why we have a fallback mode and if that isn't good enough keep going on 2.0 till it is time to switch.  Or do you envision a mass switch to 4.0 immediately?

>From the current point of view, the GNOME v3.0 desktop seems to become
no more than a kind of technology preview with a lot of gaps. In fact, a
disaster for the user, like KDE 4.0, in comparison with the stable and
mature GNOME 2. What's the function of version numbers, actually...?

Let's see where we are at when we get close to the deadline.  We still have some months yet.
 

It's odd to ship such an almost unusable stuff and mark it as stable,
referring to future versions which will probably fix the problems. Here
I speak about the goal to make the gnome-shell including clutter the
centre of all development efforts, not about the other new parts such as
gsettings, new docs appearance, gtkbuilder and many more. I'm afraid
that the users won't honour the "gnomeshellmania".

 

Clutter will get better, as will the other parts after some cycles.

sri