Well, I've tried GNOME 3 now...

[John Morris]

On Wed, 2011-04-27 at 20:53 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:

> It doesn't change the gist of the argument you are making but as a
> matter of historical record,  Fedora didn't really chose GNOME actively
> even at the time of creation.  Red Hat Linux chose GNOME over
> Enlightenment and FVWM back during the days when Red Hat Advanced
> Development Laboratories (RHAD) was created in 1998 inorder to fund
> GNOME development during the time when KDE was tied to a non-free Qt. 
> Fedora Core 1 was basically Red Hat Linux 10 renamed.  Much of choices
> are just inherited legacy.   Fedora didn't even have its own logo until
> several releases later.

Well it is time to choose because the old default choice is dead.
Because GNOME3 bears almost no relation to GNOME2 so calling it an
'upgrade' needs a magic marker taken to the dictionary first.  Since the
argument that Fedora's mandate doesn't extend to maintaining a fork of
GNOME2 is a valid one, that one is off the table.  That means a new
default environment must be picked.

GNOME 1.X bore a strong kinship to GNOME 0.X, likewise for all the
flaming that happened in the early GNOME 2.X period it was clearly the
child of GNOME 1.X.  GNOME 3.0 abandons the window manager, panel and
all of the applets from GNOME 2.X, it abandons gconf, etc.  It is a new
thing in everything but name and a lot of the same people who have
tossed GNOME under the bus in favor of their new tablet oriented
environment.  It is a totally new environment that builds on GTK+ and
friends in exactly the same way that XFCE also builds on the same low
level parts.

So now Fedora must choose a default environment to build all it's
internal tools around and base core assumptions upon.  Picking
GNOME3/GNOME Shell isn't accepting a default from upstream, it is a
choice.  An experimental one by any definition of the word and from the
flame wars (and Ubuntu's decision to reject it) engendered by it an
appeal to it's universal popularity certainly won't sell.  It is a pity
that the previous GNOME project has folded it's tent and forced this
debate, but it is what it is.


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