Will mint stop using gnome 2.32 in next release?

[walter_j]

I'm not interested in unity or gnome 3 at this time, but wonder if Mint intends on switching to gnome 3 or unity in the future?

[ThistleWeb]

These types of things are decided closer to the time, Mint 11 is just out today. I'm guessing the plan is to wait 5 or so months to see how things develop, then decide what course to choose. By that time both Unity and Gnome 3 will be a lot more mature.

[RedLeg]

I'm interested to see what happens. I prefer Unity over GNOME Shell by far, and I think the Mint team has a lot to offer Unity. Soon, die hard GNOME fans will either have to fork ver. 2 or pick a new DE. The entire Linux community is on a horizon, so to speak. I dunno, maybe a MintMobile soon?

[walter_j]

I'm trying mint because it doesn't use gnome 3 or unity. If they change, then i'll switch to kde - even though kubuntu isn't being supported all that well from ubuntu. I have a prefectly good desktop pc - why would i want to change it to a smartphone.

[karashata]

I'm pretty sure the plan as it stands now is to use GNOME 3 in Mint 12, but without the GNOME Shell enabled by default. (This was initially the plan for Mint 11 but I believe GNOME 3 wasn't really ready for something like that so the Mint devs stuck with GNOME 2.)

I personally would like to see Mint 12 ship with GNOME 3 whether or not they use GNOME Shell by default, as long as it's in the repos so anyone who wants can easily install it. I do rather like the look of GNOME Shell and I suspect by the time the next version of Mint ships, it should be much nicer (and hopefully a lot easier to customize, right now that part is a bit of a pain... Very little built-in appearance customization tools, GNOME Tweak Tool doesn't really support as much as I'd like it to... etc.).

[kernowmint]

I would love to see Mint fork Gnome 2. I don't like Gnome 3. If all the main players move to Gnome 3, I shall switch to Xfce.

[ThistleWeb]

I wonder how many threads we have in this forum discussing much the same thing? We can all go round in circles making the same arguments multiple times over in multiple threads, or we can realize that these decisions are months away yet, and that no matter where we stand on it, things will have changed a lot by then.

[walter_j]

I wonder how many threads we have in this forum discussing much the same thing? We can all go round in circles making the same arguments multiple times over in multiple threads, or we can realize that these decisions are months away yet, and that no matter where we stand on it, things will have changed a lot by then.

I'm not here to attack unity or gnome 3. If Mint is still trying to decide to change to unity or gnome 3, I won't bother with the current gnome release since it may be a dead end for me, as I won't use either gnome 3 or unity. KDE 4 took a considerable amount of time to stabilize: I expect both unity and gnome 3 will have a similar time frame to stablize.

[RedLeg]

I'm trying mint because it doesn't use gnome 3 or unity. If they change, then i'll switch to kde - even though kubuntu isn't being supported all that well from ubuntu. I have a prefectly good desktop pc - why would i want to change it to a smartphone.

I was thinking more along the lines of a tablet and the ability to have an OS be transferable between a desktop and tablet.

[DeMus]

I'm trying mint because it doesn't use gnome 3 or unity. If they change, then i'll switch to kde - even though kubuntu isn't being supported all that well from ubuntu. I have a prefectly good desktop pc - why would i want to change it to a smartphone.

+100
My thoughts exactly. Both Gnome 3 and Unity stink. They really are made for young people who like flashy stuff,and with young I mean 6 year olds. People, get serious and stay away from those toys.

[christoff522]

I dont see whats wrong with gnome2, why change something that works. If there was a necessity for change..I never heard or saw anything about this. It follows a specific line..taskbar, start button, window list, systray, clock. These work, now suddenly we have plunged upon us something that looks like it comes from some kids education CDROM. activities? seriously? Its totally unintuitive, the system tray is at the bottom? yes the menu button at the top called activities??? The thing is, when you restrict users, they will want to try something else, Gnome3 is restrictive, if i had discovered linux in 07 and they were using gnome3, I would have vomited and then thrown in my Windows xp disc. If mint goes to gnome3, knowing better these days i will just use debian.

Unity just sucks, end of. nuff said.

[AlbertP]

Gnome 3 Shell indeed sucks but there's absolutely nothing wrong when running Gnome 3 without the Shell: it's just a normal desktop. Only the panel looks a bit different, but that's easy to change and not such a disaster as the Shell.

I don't think Mint will still ship Gnome 2.32 in the next release, but I am sure it is not as horrible as the Shell or Unity.

[ThistleWeb]

I dont see whats wrong with gnome2, why change something that works. If there was a necessity for change..I never heard or saw anything about this. It follows a specific line..taskbar, start button, window list, systray, clock. These work, now suddenly we have plunged upon us something that looks like it comes from some kids education CDROM. activities? seriously? Its totally unintuitive, the system tray is at the bottom? yes the menu button at the top called activities??? The thing is, when you restrict users, they will want to try something else, Gnome3 is restrictive, if i had discovered linux in 07 and they were using gnome3, I would have vomited and then thrown in my Windows xp disc. If mint goes to gnome3, knowing better these days i will just use debian.

Unity just sucks, end of. nuff said.

Gnome 2 is nearing EOL, switching to Debian won't change that. All it will do is buy some extra time to remain with a DE that will be extinct. Gnome 3 isn't a separate project by Gnome, it's what Gnome to and it's devs are moving to. All the Gnome based distros will have a choice to make, either move to Gnome 3 (with or without the Gnome-Shell interface so many like to diss as a kids smartphone UI) or abandon Gnome altogether. My guess is that almost all of them will go for Gnome 3 in what's being called "fallback mode" right now, which amounts to a Gnome 2 layout, with GTK3, so the differences will be minimal from Gnome 2.

The idea of hanging onto Gnome 2 indefinetly seems to have taken root among some people as a possible solution. It's not going to work, it's going to get harder and harder to be a hold out. Every GTK app is either GTK1 or GTK2 now, most of the modern apps are GTK2. They will have to move up to GTK3 for Gnome 3. This means newer versions will start to produce all sorts of conflicts with GTK2 installed libs. As one app requires an upgrade in libs, it will break others that still rely on it and haven;'t been ported yet. They ONLY way you'll be able to hold onto Gnome 2 indefinetly, is to accept that at some point there are no updates to any part of the system. So when you see some funky new features in Inkscape, or LibreOffice, forget about it, you're not going to be able to install them. When you see some security announcement about a critical patch to be applied to Nautilus, forget it too.

No matter what your DE, WM or even OS is, it's important at least for security to keep updated. Gnome 2 will at some point, make that impossible without breaking stuff. Then of course the version of the distro you switch too also has an EOL where it's no longer maintained. If you don't like Gnome Shell or Unity, that's fine. They'll both evolve a lot over the next months and years, Gnome 3 is not Gnome Shell, Gnome 3 will also evolve. If none of that appeals, the best approach would be to start exploring other DE's like KDE, XFCE or LXDE or WM's like Openbox with an eye to switching over. They're at least current and maintained.

[AlbertP]

Xfce/LXDE/... with Gnome applications would be a good choice for the future. By the way, when will Gnome 2 reach EOL?

[ThistleWeb]

As far as i know the EOL date for Gnome 2 hasn't been announced yet. I'd expect a similar sort of time frame with KDE3.5 & KDE4.

[mazzy]

I dont see whats wrong with gnome2, why change something that works. If there was a necessity for change..I never heard or saw anything about this. It follows a specific line..taskbar, start button, window list, systray, clock. These work, now suddenly we have plunged upon us something that looks like it comes from some kids education CDROM. activities? seriously? Its totally unintuitive, the system tray is at the bottom? yes the menu button at the top called activities??? The thing is, when you restrict users, they will want to try something else, Gnome3 is restrictive, if i had discovered linux in 07 and they were using gnome3, I would have vomited and then thrown in my Windows xp disc. If mint goes to gnome3, knowing better these days i will just use debian.

Unity just sucks, end of. nuff said.

Gnome 2 is nearing EOL, switching to Debian won't change that. All it will do is buy some extra time to remain with a DE that will be extinct. Gnome 3 isn't a separate project by Gnome, it's what Gnome to and it's devs are moving to. All the Gnome based distros will have a choice to make, either move to Gnome 3 (with or without the Gnome-Shell interface so many like to diss as a kids smartphone UI) or abandon Gnome altogether. My guess is that almost all of them will go for Gnome 3 in what's being called "fallback mode" right now, which amounts to a Gnome 2 layout, with GTK3, so the differences will be minimal from Gnome 2.

[snip]

All of your points are valid but in my opinion, Gnome 3 is not ready and switching to it wont change things either. I'm happy with the Mint's team commitment to waiting it out with Gnome 2 in the mean time and I'll be coming over to this side of the fence as soon as I get the time to reformat.

Gnome 2 is super polished and functional - and the Microsoft style decision to rewrite everything for Gnome 3 means that it may be a couple of years before Gnome 3 is as polished a DE. All I'm looking for is a distro that is willing to wait until its ready and not force me to be a beta tester.

[Kendall]

Xfce/LXDE/... with Gnome applications would be a good choice for the future. By the way, when will Gnome 2 reach EOL?

Both Xfce and LXDE will have to port all of their components to GTK3 as well, so though there will be less noticeable difference the same toolkit that Gnome 3 uses will still be there. I personally would have liked to have seen a little more fluidity in GTK2 compatibility, but I understand that some changes were necessary to improve the efficiency of the toolkit.

My only gripe with the whole thing is the deprecation of pygtk, which means I'll be needing to rewrite some apps in the very near future. I see nothing wrong with either Gnome 3 or Unity as both seem to be logical "next steps" in desktop computing. I can imagine seeing the exact same discussions come up in a few years when GTK4 eventually comes out.

[AlbertP]

If you're rewriting applications, then you could also re-write them in another language. Software Manager, for example, consumes an awful lot of memory: 150MB. And Mintmenu needs 30MB and always loads as latest panel item because it's written in Python.

[ThistleWeb]

I can imagine seeing the exact same discussions come up in a few years when GTK4 eventually comes out.

Personally I plan to bypass both GTK4 and GTK5 and move straight to GTK6, it looks shweet

[tdockery97]

Thanks to a couple of the above posters for making something clear. Those of us who have been vocally criticizing Gnome 3 don't hate Gnome 3. We dislike Gnome Shell. As long as we can still have our normal panels and/or preferred docks and such, with the same configurability we have now, then there is nothing to be afraid of and no reason to move away from Gnome.