GNOME Classic Fights to Win Users Back

A few months ago GNOME announced that they would be dropping the fallback mode, but met with a bit of resistance. To appease the peasants, developers said they would start supporting extensions that mimicked classic GNOME 2 features. Well, Matthias Clasen announced the early results of their efforts.

In the GNOME 3.7.5 development release announcement the words "more complete classic mode" piqued the interest of certain Linux writers and, fortunately for you, I don't mean me. Users using Ubuntus 12.10 and 13.04 were treated to testing packages and Webupd8.org posted some pictures. After installing said packages, he said "a new 'GNOME Classic' session has showed up in the login screen," but "this isn't the old fallback session."

The blogger known only as Andrew said that you'll get a window list in the lower panel and a notification applet, clock, and such in the upper. An application and places drop-down menus occupy the upper left. Windows have the traditional minimize, maximize, and close buttons.

The extensions used by the new GNOME Classic session are: AlternateTab, Places Status Indicator, Applications Menu, Static workspaces, Window List, Default Minimize and Maximize and Launch New Instance.

See Andrew's full post for lots more screenshots and a tour with commentary.