On Friday 01 April 2011 20:41:54 Bill Davidsen wrote: > You may not be all that happy with XFCE either, if what you really want is > GNOME-2. I don't know where to go after fc14, what I want is GNOME-2, and > that isn't happening, Fedora developers drank the kool-aid and not only > gave up the far more usable GNOME-2, but also the Fedora theme, replacing > with the GNOME-3 prison bars theme. > > It's been a good ride, but unless a better WM comes along fc14 is the final > destination. I remember the time when KDE 4.0 appeared in Fedora stable. A whole bunch of people started bitching how ugly and bad it was, a "dumbed-down-Gnome", whatever. And this bunch of people who were using KDE 3.5 decided to switch to Gnome (Linus Thorvalds being one of the most notable), because "KDE developers went nuts", to put it simply. There was just a handful of us left devoted to learn the new desktop paradigms KDE4 introduced. Back then, I have read somewhere that Gnome (and not just Gnome) is planning to go in the same direction, they just needed more development time. In various discussions on this list (feel free to search the archives), I did make a point that this kind of thing is about to happen with Gnome in the near future, but the general opinion was that Gnome devs are not that stupid and that they will not repeat the KDE 4.0 mistakes. And now I see it happen. Granted, the mistakes are maybe not the same ones KDE folks were nervous about, but there is roughly equivalent dissatisfaction with the new Gnome as was with KDE. I also (humbly) predicted that this will induce a lot of people to migrate back to KDE, which should be fixed and polished-up by then (ie. by now). Btw, if you bother to take a look at the current KDE 4.5.5, you'll find that it indeed is polished-up and works quite nice. So I guess there will be some backflow of users to KDE from the new Gnome population, coming soon with F15. There was also some talk back then about parallel support for both KDE 4.0 and KDE 3.5, just like there is today about Gnome 3 and 2. But it didn't happen for KDE, since devs and packagers didn't want to do a double job, and there was noone else to step up and maintain the old and not-developed-anymore 3.5 version. Somehow I have a feeling that a similar thing is going to happen now with Gnome. Devs are going to abandon version 2 in order to focus on 3 more efficiently, packagers are going to go with latest&greatest as per Fedora philosophy, and there will be noone to step up and do the work to keep the old Gnome 2 in Fedora. And finally, Fedora will not be the only distro where this happens, others will follow eventually, just like they did with KDE. I don't want to play a prophet or to sound negative, but --- mark my words... ;-) My advice is to just try to adapt to new Gnome, or migrate to KDE or some other DE, and adapt to that. But don't weep and moan about Gnome 2, it will be effectively dead very soon, my guess is by the time F15 comes out. ;-) :-) Marko -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
