On 05/02/13 12:09 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

In the Gnome2 days you had choices between functionally similar DEs.

Times have changed ... Gnome has been forked multiply (Gnome3, MATE, Cinammon), xfce/enlightenment are back.

Gnome 3 is still Gnome. Both MATE and Cinnamon which came years after Gnome 3 via Gnome-Shell, are reactionary for self-interest because these DE can easily reproduced through Gnome-Shell extensions meaning they will become irrelevant in a future.

Luya

While I agree that Gnome 3 is still Gnome... it is still Gnome in the sense that Windows 8 is still just the new version of Windows.

Also, "years after"? I first read about MATE on the Arch forums back in 2011, a few months after the final release of Gnome 3 (which was in April 2011): https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=121162 Likewise, the first post about Cinnamon on the Linux Mint website I can find was in December 2011. Unless you were referring to the Gnome 3 development cycle, I suppose.

For the record, I'm pretty sure replacing Gnome 3 with Cinnamon isn't the best idea. (I think if we change the default at all it should probably be to KDE instead, but that's just me). However, let's not pretend Gnome 3 (or "Gnome 3 with Gnome Shell") isn't a very different desktop environment from its predecessor, even though "it is still Gnome".

Ben