On Thu, 2010-12-23 at 15:01 -0600, Jason D. Clinton wrote: > On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 12:54, Carlos Garcia Campos > <carlo...@gnome.org> wrote: > I disagree. If I run gnome-session with the classic mode I > expect to > see exactly what I have right now, with all the applets. The > definition of essential applet is probably different for every > user. > > I am not a designer but I've been paying attention to this process for > about 1.5 years now so I think I can address your concerns. > > We are on the path of ending the insanity of behavior customization > with GNOME 3 (though all are welcome to help with the maintenance of > the gnome-applets module, of course.) Obviously, personalization is > staying (wallpaper, themes, cursors, sounds, preferences). In GNOME 3, > the objective is create a desktop that actually works out of the box; > one that doesn't require that you help your family members fiddle with > a bunch of settings before it's a tolerable experience. (For example, > the very first thing I kill is the workspace switcher and show desktop > applets because no family member can comprehend looking at them to > figure out where all their windows just went after they accidentally > click them. In Shell these are replaced with the same features but in > a way which has an actual usable UI.) > > This means stopping the abuse of applets which in some cases are > stand-ins for something that should be a "desktop widget" (Finance and > Deskbar, for example)[1] and in other cases are horrible hacks that > try to "fix" bad design elsewhere in the OS (battery charge applet > predates g-p-m, for example). Others are just a pointless toys which > are maintenance burden. In most cases the outcome will be that some > combination of the legacy notification area icons and essential > applets will provide access to hardware-related and session-related > functions in the order and locations they located in the Shell design. > Clearly, network, keyboard, power, a11y, sound, bluetooth, system, > applications and clock are staying. Probably launchers. Places is a > long-term unknown. There are going to be others; the list is still a > work in-progress. > > GNOME 2 fallback experience should be gnome-panel, metacity > and > gnome-applets. > > It's a fallback but it's also going in to long-term maintenance mode > which means we need to have a coherent experience between the > "compatible" and Shell desktop environments. And they need to continue > to adapt to API changes. Try to imagine the next major vertical > hardware integration to come along, say, for example, that we get a > desktop-wide, WiFi supported, geolocation API with privacy guards. Now > we have to write a geolocation indicator and UI for both shells. (Just > speculating.) > > We're planning for the future here and for one in which everyone has a > good experience without having to muck around.
Though I agree that we must planning the future, we also need to give a migration path for our users. There are big deployments out there, and sometimes they need _time_ for evaluating the new features, updating their hardware if necessary, adapting their configurations, etc. I think that it is even a good idea to give a maintenance promise for a specific period of time for gnome-panel, metacity and gnome-applets. But, talk is cheap and I don't know if we as a project can made this promise. Just my two cents, -- Juanjo Marin _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list