> owning hardware newer than 5 years old is a privilege, not the norm
GNOME Shell ran fine on my old laptop with 2 GB of RAM. This was a budget
laptop (only a couple hundred dollars when it was bought) from 2007. That's 8
years old. Of course, it had an Intel GPU which could do hardware
acceleration, but that's only relevant to whether it can run GNOME Shell
well; a similar computer with a Radeon GPU would run GNOME Flashback or MATE
just fine.
> Rather than having a "Mini" option, I would create a "Maxi" option for new
users with computers 1-2 years old, featuring a DE that can make use of all
the potential of their hardware, and give them all the eye candy I presume
they expect.
I think you are misunderstanding the purpose of GNOME 3's design. It's not
"eye candy". In fact, GNOME Shell doesn't have a whole lot of eye candy. Its
purpose is to make it easy to pick up and use the system without having to
learn how to use it. I think it accomplishes this goal quite well.
It also doesn't "make use of all the potential" of your hardware. That would
be a terrible design for a desktop environment; you have to use the hardware
for other things, too. Even KDE doesn't do that, and that DE is known to be
extremely heavy.
Advertising GNOME Shell as if it's an extremely power-hungry DE only suitable
for those who have very recent hardware would not only be wrong, it would
turn off pretty much everyone, including those who would benefit from GNOME
Shell's easier design.
> GNOME Fallback doesn't run on this PC without throwing me into swap hell
How much RAM do you have? 2 GB of RAM was low-end in 2007, and my system is
currently using about 1.4 GiB (that's with a Web browser and several other
things open).
I looked for a report on RAM usage of desktop environments, and this was the
best report I could find, from 2013:
https://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-desktops/
Even KDE, the heaviest RAM user of all of the DEs tested, used only 201 MB by
itself. GNOME 3 (with GNOME Shell) used 155 MB by itself. That's enough to
cause a problem with real usage (you have to run other programs, after all),
but not enough to prevent you from running the desktop environment at all if
you have at least 1 GB of RAM.
In fact, I can speak on this from personal experience: I once accidentally
left one of the RAM cards in that old laptop I mentioned partly dislodged,
reducing the available RAM to 1 GB. I was always using GNOME Shell at the
time. I did notice a performance hit, but it not from running GNOME at all.
The performance hit happened when I opened a few programs that used a
substantial amount of RAM, on top of GNOME Shell.
