GNOME 3 Fallback Makes a Comeback, of Sorts

It was recently announced that GNOME 3.8 would not be including the GNOME 2 fallback mode. This had a lot of folks a bit concerned. Apparently it was used more than GNOME developers figured. Not wanting to go backwards, Matthias Clasen has thought of a way that may pacify users of the departing fallback mode.

Clasen posted to a GNOME mailing list today that he thinks using some community extensions to bring back GNOME 2-like features is the answer. He said exactly, "we have a pretty awesome extension mechanism in gnome-shell (extensions.gnome.org), and there are a ton of extensions out there which allow users to bring back many of the 'classic' UX elements."

To that end, he thinks it would be a good idea for GNOME developers to adopt several of these extension to support officially and release updates with the other GNOME tarballs. The compiling options are already in place for this, Clasen explains, "Giovanni already added an --enable-extensions=classic-mode configure option to the gnome-shell-extensions repository, which we will use for this work."

Neither the list of supported extension nor the user toggle have been envisioned as of yet, but Clasen figures it'd be some kind of option in the GNOME configuration somewhere. The list isn't started yet, but Clasen said they'd only pick a few that provide those few features users really love like the "classic alt tab, task bar, min/max buttons, main menu."