Gnome classic mode
 

Thomas Goirand writes ("Re: Gnome classic mode"):
> Another thing: upstream decided to display a warning. I'm not sure it is
> the role of Debian to decide they are wrong.

One of the points of having a distro is that a distro (being an entity
with a better view of the bigger picture and a closer connection to
the user) can make decisions to do things differently to upstream.

It is not the job of Debian to do precisely what upstream think best.
It is our job to do what /we/ think best. That's how Free Software
works.

In particular it is precisely the role of Debian to diverge from
upstream wherever we think it best to do so. That includes an
assessment of the amount of effort it would cost us to do so, of
course, but in this case the amount of effort to disable the warning
is going to be negligible. So now that we are thinking about the
question (and going to the effort of making a decision about it) we
should make our own judgement about whether that warning is valuable.

I'm not sure of my actual opinion about the warning because I'm not
sure of the technical background. But I think Debian should try to be
remain good and useable even on machines with poor or no 3D graphics
support, and not be seduced by bling and try to compete with the likes
of Apple. There are many more people in the world whose computers
don't have the latest shinies.

Ian.


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Gnome classic mode
 

Le mardi 11 septembre 2012 Ã* 15:58 +0100, Ian Jackson a écrit :
> I'm not sure of my actual opinion about the warning because I'm not
> sure of the technical background. But I think Debian should try to be
> remain good and useable even on machines with poor or no 3D graphics
> support, and not be seduced by bling and try to compete with the likes
> of Apple. There are many more people in the world whose computers
> don't have the latest shinies.

Yes, and this is why we ship and support “GNOME 3 classic� fully. It
works for people with low-end machines, for those who want to keep their
3D power available for serious sh*t, and for nostalgics of GNOME 2.

Can we move on now? I don’t even understand how a *one-time warning*
explaining a user that his desktop will look different from what he
might obtain on another Debian machine can even be a serious topic of
discussion for debian-devel.

--
.'`. Josselin Mouette
: :' :
`. `'
`-


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Gnome classic mode
 

Josselin Mouette writes ("Re: Gnome classic mode"):
> Le mardi 11 septembre 2012 Ã* 15:58 +0100, Ian Jackson a écrit :
> > I'm not sure of my actual opinion about the warning because I'm not
> > sure of the technical background. But I think Debian should try to be
> > remain good and useable even on machines with poor or no 3D graphics
> > support, and not be seduced by bling and try to compete with the likes
> > of Apple. There are many more people in the world whose computers
> > don't have the latest shinies.
>
> Yes, and this is why we ship and support “GNOME 3 classic� fully. It
> works for people with low-end machines, for those who want to keep their
> 3D power available for serious sh*t, and for nostalgics of GNOME 2.

So if it works just fine without the 3D I don't understand what the
warning is for.

> Can we move on now? I don’t even understand how a *one-time warning*
> explaining a user that his desktop will look different from what he
> might obtain on another Debian machine can even be a serious topic of
> discussion for debian-devel.

We normally try quite hard to reduce the number of questions in the
installer, naggy prompts, etc., to make it as easy as possible to get
started with Debian. If there is nothing wrong with the non-3D
installation, and nothing the user can do about it, then surely a
warning isn't appropriate.

And a message that will be seen by a substantial proportion of
Debian's new users is I think a perfectly good topic of conversation
here.

Ian.


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Gnome classic mode
 

On 09/11/2012 12:55 PM, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Josselin Mouette writes ("Re: Gnome classic mode"):
>> Can we move on now? I don’t even understand how a *one-time warning*
>> explaining a user that his desktop will look different from what he
>> might obtain on another Debian machine can even be a serious topic of
>> discussion for debian-devel.
>
> We normally try quite hard to reduce the number of questions in the
> installer, naggy prompts, etc., to make it as easy as possible to get
> started with Debian. If there is nothing wrong with the non-3D
> installation, and nothing the user can do about it, then surely a
> warning isn't appropriate.
>
> And a message that will be seen by a substantial proportion of
> Debian's new users is I think a perfectly good topic of conversation
> here.

I agree. I also would like to point out that current test builds of gnome live images have this
issue. So without further effort to make a live-specific fix for this issue (something we try to
avoid, as live images should reflect as closely as possible what someone sees when they install
Debian) every time the live image is booted they will see this image unless they happen to be using
persistence (which takes special effort by the user to set up, as it requires some place to write
the persistence data to be explicitly designated).

Ben



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Gnome classic mode
 

On 11/09/2012 11:32, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le mardi 11 septembre 2012 Ã* 15:58 +0100, Ian Jackson a écrit :
>> I'm not sure of my actual opinion about the warning because I'm not
>> sure of the technical background. But I think Debian should try to be
>> remain good and useable even on machines with poor or no 3D graphics
>> support, and not be seduced by bling and try to compete with the likes
>> of Apple. There are many more people in the world whose computers
>> don't have the latest shinies.
>
> Yes, and this is why we ship and support “GNOME 3 classic� fully. It
> works for people with low-end machines, for those who want to keep their
> 3D power available for serious sh*t, and for nostalgics of GNOME 2.
>
> Can we move on now? I don’t even understand how a *one-time warning*
> explaining a user that his desktop will look different from what he
> might obtain on another Debian machine can even be a serious topic of
> discussion for debian-devel.

I think I can explain it to you. Many people who install Debian for the
first time do now know what Gnome is (or even Gnome Classic), nor do
they realise that they could or choose something else from the session
menu if they don't want to see a message telling them that something is
broken.

It's way more likely that someone who explicitly wants gnome shell but
gets a gnome-fallback session will notice that they need to do something
about it.

-Jonathan


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Gnome classic mode
 

On 09/11/2012 01:11 PM, Ben Armstrong wrote:
> every time the live image is booted they will see this image unless they happen to be using
^^^^^
I meant to say "see this error message", not "see this image". ugh. crappy proofing, sorry.

Ben


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Gnome classic mode
 

+++ Jonathan Carter [2012-09-11 12:34 -0400]:
> On 11/09/2012 11:32, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> > Can we move on now? I don’t even understand how a *one-time warning*
> > explaining a user that his desktop will look different from what he
> > might obtain on another Debian machine can even be a serious topic of
> > discussion for debian-devel.
>
> I think I can explain it to you. Many people who install Debian for the
> first time do now know what Gnome is (or even Gnome Classic), nor do
> they realise that they could or choose something else from the session
> menu if they don't want to see a message telling them that something is
> broken.

If the message tells people to select 'gnome classic' in the logon
menu to make it go away then that seems reasonable to me.

(I've never seen this message as I switched to XFCE before gnome3 came
out)

I'd be happy if xfce was the default. Which is better depends if one
prefers 'dull-but-works-everywhere' over
'shiny-but-not-universaly-liked'. I can see reasonable arguments in
favour of either.

Wookey
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Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/


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Gnome classic mode
 

On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 1:22 PM, Wookey wrote:
> I'd be happy if xfce was the default. Which is better depends if one
> prefers 'dull-but-works-everywhere' over
> 'shiny-but-not-universaly-liked'. I can see reasonable arguments in
> favour of either.

Robustness is a rather important/lofty goal especially given the often
touted "universal operating system" moniker [0],[1]. Debian has never
been specifically about the latest shiny anyway. So, let's be brave
and choose the less ubiquitous (today) but more robust overall option.

Best wishes,
Mike

[0] http://www.debian.org [page title]
[1] http://pthree.org/2009/11/17/debian-the-universal-operating-system


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Gnome classic mode
 

On 09/11/2012 02:22 PM, Wookey wrote:
> If the message tells people to select 'gnome classic' in the logon
> menu to make it go away then that seems reasonable to me.

Again, not really an option for our live images. Two obvious options are:

1. Modify the live image to silently fail over to gnome classic. If that's not what a real install
of Debian does, I really think this is a bad solution as it sets wrong expectations for how Debian
is going to behave after they finish the test drive and do an install.

2. Do nothing. Let the error occur. This warns the user that their hardware isn't going to work well
with gnome3, but is incredibly annoying for anyone who wants to actually use fallback mode (possibly
for more than a single boot) on the live gnome images and has already seen the message.

Which brings us back to what has already been proposed earlier in this thread:

3. Don't nag the user with this error. Silently fail over to gnome classic by default.

I think this is the lesser of evils, both from my perspective as a Debian live team member, and in
terms of what I think is best for users. I think it's obvious enough that you're not in gnome-shell
when you land in fallback mode that you don't have to annoy users with a scary looking message as
well. As a compromise I would accept if the notification were kept, but in a much subtler form.

Ben


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Gnome classic mode
 

Wookey <wookey@wookware.org> (11/09/2012):
> If the message tells people to select 'gnome classic' in the logon
> menu to make it go away then that seems reasonable to me.

That's not needed; I did write “at first login�. (For those who wonder, the
fact it's been displayed is then stored in dconf, see details in [1].)

1. http://lists.debian.org/20120805093640.GA26180@mraw.org

Mraw,
KiBi.