Matthias Clasen on the behalf of the GNOME Release Team has announced that they have decided to eliminate GNOME’s “fallback mode” with the upcoming 3.8 release that allowed a “GNOME classic” mode that didn’t depend upon OpenGL/3D rendering and was more like the GNOME2 traitional desktop.
Too right it is … Gnome seem intent on self destructing :
With the rise of ARM, and the fact that currently there isn’t an open-source Linux graphics driver with OpenGL support for any ARM SoC. why would anyone think it a good idea to get “heavier” … I’m baffled by this, they’re obviously aiming the Gnome3 desktop at mobile … but making it nearly useless on ARM ???
Cinnamon is a Linux desktop which provides advanced innovative features and a traditional user experience. The desktop layout is similar to Gnome 2. The underlying technology is forked from Gnome Shell.
Granted … but it’s still a fork of “gnome-session-fallback” part of the shell … you only have to run gnome-session-fallback in Ubuntu to see Cinnamon is the same thing in green, with the slab menu.
Really it’s just a “tweaked” gnome-session-fallback.
So (unless I’m mistaken) Cinnamon won’t be able to move beyond Gnome 3.(whatever came before 8 …7 ?).
I can’t see how Cinnamon won’t be affected by this, unless they fork a lot more of the code
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the underpinning of Cinnamon … but it “looks and behaves” one hell of a lot like gnome-seesion-fallback, that much so that even though it might be separate “packages” I’m still betting it uses most of the gnome-session-fallback code just re-packaged as it were.