[Mageia-discuss] Gnome3 on Mageia 1

[Olav Vitters]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2011 at 04:00:28PM +0200, Thomas Lottmann wrote:
> Le 07/06/2011 10:00, Olav Vitters a écrit :
> >On Mon, Jun 06, 2011 at 10:48:55AM +0200, Thomas Lottmann wrote:
> >>On the other hand, I'd like to still have the possibility to keep
> >>and install Gnome 2.xx in the future, as Gnome 3 isn't both stable
> >>and reliable and complete yet.
> >GNOME 2.x is not needed, there is the fallback mode in GNOME3; it'll
> >give you a gnome-panel and so on. The default layout looks like
> >GNOME-shell, but it just is a newer gnome-panel.
> >
> >Regarding GNOME 3 not being reliable, can you reference some bugreports?
> >This as I don't see any huge problems, especially not for a .0 release.
> 
> The falback mode still relies qui a lot on Gnome 3. I concede I need

That is the point, gnome-panel continues to be maintained in 3.x. But
for GNOME 3, gnome-panel is mainly:
 * removing of deprecated stuff like bonobo
 * usage of gtk3 instead of gtk2
 * some UI changes to make it look like GNOME shell

See for instance
http://www.vuntz.net/journal/post/2011/04/13/gnome-panel-is-dead,-long-live-gnome-panel!

Of course, GNOME 3.x relies on a new enough networkmanager and so on.
The fallback will require the same. Similarly, gnome-control-center will
look different and so on. This is also why it is called fallback
(metacity instead of mutter, gnome-panel instead of gnome-shell,
networkmanager uses the trayicon, rest is more or less similar).

> to do some more testing on a longer period of time, but on the two
> computer using a SuSE based system running Gnome 3, I had quite a
> lot numerous visual issues and got one program crashing. But some
> time has passed and there were probably updates so I need to retest.

This is totally different from the experiences I heard of (aside from
driver issues), so it surprises me. Usually feedback is regarding e.g.
user interface or broken drivers.

If not too offtopic for this list, could you expand on the visual
issues? Something driver related, or something indicating a bug within a
program? Also, which program crashed?

I'd assume if GNOME 3 would be included, it would start with GNOME 3.1
(unstable version leading up to 3.2). So Mageia 2 would have the 3.2
release, not the 3.0 one. In practice: a lot more effort and fixes since
3.0.0.

> But looking at the available environments, I'm thinking that in case
> some people really can't handle Gnome 3, there is actually Xfce that
> can be a good fallback. I'm not sure there are enough people for
> maintaining Gnome 2.32 for six extra months. I am simply cautions
> about releases that may not be really polished and stable.

My main experience is with Mandriva, and I always loved how quickly
they'd have all the new GNOME development releases (generally within
hours of the tarballs being available). That's actually a few days
before GNOME actually does a release (due to release process + QA).

I think not having GNOME 3.0 was a good choice, but there is enough time
now and experience to integrate 3.2 nicely.

Related to your question who'd maintain GNOME 2.32? Within GNOME or
within Mageia? There won't be any GNOME 2.32.x release within GNOME;
though anyone is free to provide patches for those branches.
-- 
Regards,
Olav