

GNOME 3 drops fallback mode in 3.8 - EdiX
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2012-November/msg00009.html

======
aortega
This is insane. I dont know who takes decisions in Gnome but has to be fired
immediately. Gnome 2 was a nice and fast DE, it ran anywhere, it was great.
They made so many bad decisions with Gnome 3, stopped caring for the user long
ago and now they code only from themselves.

~~~
bkor
I was part of the decision. I'm not sure if you get the concept of volunteers.
My influence and decision abilities is not based on "company ideas" as you
seem to think.

Meaning: I wasn't hired, I cannot be fired.

~~~
buster
Drop the fallback mode if it means better quality of the rest. Seriously,
Gnome Shell runs fine on my Intel integrated graphics, i suppose it runs fine
on nvidia and amd as well, so why fallback mode anyway.

How about communicating to distributions to fallback to gnome2 or xfce or
something similar as a recommendation?

~~~
Rovanion
It may run fine on many, but it runs horrible on so many others. Running both
Nvidia and ATI binary drivers often result in absolutely horrid performance
with changes to the UI often not being rendered until after the animations are
over.

~~~
truncate
Apart from that, GDM itself performs horribly. I can almost always see a lag.
Shouldn't happen on core i 2nd Gen atleast!

------
antihero
If you're the sort of person that used fallback mode and hated Gnome Shell,
you'd have served yourself well by jumping ship a long time ago.

------
dsirijus
All this bodes well for Xfce, which is already an outstanding effort. Nice to
see it included in future releases of Debian as default, for some spotlight.

~~~
hendi_
This is wrong, see [http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-
installer/News/2012/20121...](http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-
installer/News/2012/20121..).

    
    
      - Most of GNOME fits onto CD#1 again (network-less installation).
      - LXDE and Xfce now live on separate images.
    

GNOME was removed from CD1 due to space reasons, but this was only temporarily
(they've meanwhile fixed the space issues). That GNOME didn't fit onto CD1
anymore and that Xfce would be the future was big in the news. That this
change was reverted some weeks later, and no Xfce isn't even on the first CD,
didn't make the news though. Guess that's not as interesting as GNOME-hate.

~~~
dsirijus
Well, if you had submitted it, I'm sure it would get frontpaged here.

I just really wasn't aware of the revert and the git commit message sounded
promising. [1]

[1]
[http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=co...](http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=commit;h=2a962cc65cdba010177f27e8824ba10d9a799a08)

------
jhealy
That's a shame. I was opting to use fallback mode so I could continue using
gnome without gnome-shell.

When 3.8 hits debian unstable I guess I'll move to a different window manager.

~~~
hendi_
That's the thing. The GNOME project understands itself more as an OS than just
as a "window manager".

Most (not all, but most) of the hate against GNOME 3 is not against GNOME, but
against gnome-shell and gnome-control-center. These are just a few (though
essential) pieces of the GNOME desktop. If you don't like the shell you can
still use GNOME's apps from another WM (Xmonad, sawfish, KWin) or even from
another DE (like Xfce).

------
mseepgood
Makes sense, since no one was interested in maintaining it.

~~~
brusch
When installing GNOME3 I had a little chicken-and-egg-problem. Without
installing additional drivers GNOME3 wouldn't work, so the fallback mode was
handy to search the internet for the correct drivers for my chipset and
install them.

But as long as they have some solution for this problem (and I think it is
pretty common, because debian always installs with generic drivers for your
hardware), I think it is no problem to remove the fallback mode.

~~~
Nursie
Debian Wheezy will default to XFCE (I think), so you can use that instead of
fallback mode for this use case.

You may find you just like using it....

IIRC the reasoning was that GNOME Shell is too big to fit on the default
install CD, rather than any idealogical thing.

~~~
hendi_
This is wrong, see [http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-
installer/News/2012/20121...](http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-
installer/News/2012/20121018)

    
    
      - Most of GNOME fits onto CD#1 again (network-less installation).
      - LXDE and Xfce now live on separate images.

~~~
Nursie
Quite a recent change then!

Shame, XFCE would be a good default.

~~~
PommeDeTerre
I hope that this decision causes them to re-think their position.

------
dysoco
I hate GNOME 3, but I agree with this move. If you like classic desktops, and
you have been using Gnome-Fallback you are doing it wrong: GNOME 3 is designed
to be used with the Gnome-Shell.

XFCE and Mate are both excellent Desktop Environments which follow a "classic"
approach. (Or you can try KDE too).

------
bni
So what will people running GNOME in VMware see? GNOME failed to launch?

~~~
Andrex
They'll still see Gnome Shell. They added LLVM support for software-rendering
about a year ago:
[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxM...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxMjI)

Fallback Mode was only still in use by people who preferred Gnome 2 and forced
it on, everybody else with Gnome 3 saw Gnome Shell.

Per the link, even back then they discussed dropping Fallback Mode after full
LLVM had been added:

> "As said by Red Hat's Adam Williamson on the Fedora mailing list, 'That's
> really a policy decision for the GNOME / Fedora desktop teams, not for ajax.
> But based on what they've said in the past, I expect that once most hardware
> that previously needed the fallback mode is covered, fallback mode will die.
> AIUI, fallback mode isn't meant to be a GNOME 2-by-stealth for Shell
> refuseniks, it's purely an attempt to accommodate hardware which doesn't
> support Shell.'"

------
unwind
I had to look this up, and it appears in this context, "fallback mode" refers
to "sort of a failsafe mode, which should kick in on machines with unsupported
graphics cards".

I guess it turns of compositing and such modernities.

[http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/3.3/fallback-
mode....](http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/3.3/fallback-mode.html.en)

~~~
reidrac
There's a follow up to the linked post that explain the cases where Gnome 3
it's not an option and the fallback mode is OK:

[https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-
team/2012-November/m...](https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-
team/2012-November/msg00012.html)

Basically: some GPU drivers are not good enough to run Gnome (it was way worse
about 2 years ago), some old machines can't deal with the software rendering
(that is not available for all the platforms, it's only for x86 and ARM -I
think-), and there is some performance impact when running 3D apps on Gnome 3
(I've noticed that myself, my laptop fans go berserk!).

Besides the fallback mode was used by some users that were looking for a Gnome
2 alike experience, but apparently that was not the reason of fallback mode to
exist.

~~~
bkor
The idea is that by dropping fallback, people can change gnome-panel and
metacity as they wish. Meaning: making it work (and look) more like GNOME 2.

I'm not sure if this is entirely feasible in practice. Actually fallback mode
consist of various changes in loads of projects. I'm guessing it'll be broken
pretty quickly in GNOME 3.7.x. The intention was still that you could still
get a more GNOME 2 experience by not needing gnome-panel+metacity for fallback
mode... but after all the investigations, not sure if that can still be
achieved.

------
gosub
For a brief period of time, I used Fedora and Gnome3. Having a radeon hd46XX,
gnome refused to display anything properly, except in fallback-mode. I think
this should be its use: not a UX choice, but a mode for when graphic
acceleration fails.

------
z3phyr
Xmonad withought a de, thats my cup of tea nowadays. I am content.

------
ibotty
i wonder if xmonad's Config.Gnome will get ported away from the fallback mode
(if this is possible).

~~~
gvalkov
Unfortunately, gnome-shell desktop components are closely tied to mutter. For
example, the fallback gnome-panel [1] and the gnome-shell gnome-panel [2] are
two entirely different beasts (same goes for cinnamon, where they've never had
a fallback panel to begin with). There's just no way to run mutter and xmonad
at the same time.

It is becoming ever so difficult to be an xmonad user who enjoys the
occasional niceties of modern desktop environments (panels, widgets etc). The
state of component reuse in modern linux DE is just miserable.

Kudos to the KDE people for keeping their desktop 'dissectible' after all this
time. I've had great success in using plasma-desktop with xmonad in the past.
Unfortunately, KDE looks/feels wrong to me in ways that no theme has ever been
able to correct (see [3] [4]). I wish they adopted 'flatter' look & feel
guidelines - right now, there is just too much bling, roundedness and qt
widget animations for my taste (relying on SVGs for theming plasma is overkill
too, imho). I have a lot of gripes (still can't get over Akonadi needing
mysql) with KDE, but I really _do_ respect the work they do.

We can't have nice things ...

[1]: <http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-panel/tree/gnome-panel>

[2]: <http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/tree/js/ui/panel.js>

[3]: <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/KDE_4.png>

[4]: [http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/01/1.2...](http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/01/1.2.0.png)

~~~
bryanlarsen
Are you still using plasma-desktop with xmonad? Do you have some pointers on
how to do that? As an xmonad user, I'd like to try it out.

~~~
gvalkov
You could either run _plasma-desktop_ through .xinitrc or set KDEWM to xmonad
in .xsession. You will have to send _plasma-desktop_ to the float layer. It's
best if you make xmonad act like an EWMH compatible WM by using the
_EwmhDesktops_ [1] log hook and I think the _ManageDocks_ [2] manage hook also
played a role. The relevant xmonad.hs changes are:

    
    
        import XMonad.Hooks.ManageDocks
        import XMonad.Hooks.EwmhDesktops
    
        managehook = composeAll
                     [ className =? "Plasma-desktop" --> doFloat]
        
        defaults = defaultConfig {
                 , manageHook = managehook <+> manageDocks
                 }
    
        main = xmonad $ ewmh defaults
    

There are a lot of dialogs that pop up in KDE applications that you'll
probably want to add to the float layer. I haven't tried it, but there is this
plasmoid [3] that can offer you better integration with xmonad's way of
working with workspaces (xmobar/dzen2 style).

Good luck!

[1]: [http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Hooks-
Ew...](http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Hooks-
EwmhDesktops.html)

[2]: [http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Hooks-
Ma...](http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Hooks-
ManageDocks.html)

[3]: <http://gitorious.org/xmonad-log-plasmoid>

