Gnome is transitioning to Only Wayland Support

I for one hope that Gnome 3 stagnates at whatever version we have now. So we don't need to constantly treadmill with increasingly worse software. Perhaps we can do what we *should* have done with Gnome 2 and freeze its version for a decade or so allowing for some actual polish.
 
bgavin said:
Newb question: what is preferred over Gnome?
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You may have a look at the MATE Desktop Environment, which is a fork of Gnome 2. There is a port for it: x11/mate

Personally, I moved away from “Desktop Environments” once I realized that their additional features have little or impact on my productivity. Nowadays, I run x11-wm/fvwm2 together with a carefully written config file.

A friend once said: “What is the fuss about graphical environments anyway? All you need it to do is opening a terminal window.”
 
bgavin said:
Newb question: what is preferred over Gnome?
Click to expand...
Well, I am not sure if it is preferred but I am using Mate now. I loved gnome but the fuzz with flatpaks I decided to not use it anymore. Gnome 4.x is lovely to work with, lot's of stuff to do with they keyboard if you invest some time.

Mate is gtk3 afaik and that has been a stable DE for me for about a year or so. I can do the same with it.
 
Those of you who have used both Gnome 2 *and* Mate, don't you find the latter extremely rough and unpolished? It feels like a weird Gtk3 transition rather than a clean consistent environment. Loads of things are broken (more than Gnome 2).

Definitely give i.e RHEL 5 or the Solaris 10 Sun Java desktop to get a feel for how Gnome 2 used to be.
 
What's good about Wayland, is each compositor (window manager) can do what it wants, regarding how it operates and in its own styles of governance. There's XWayland which is intended to allow X applications to run on top of Wayland.

Furthermore, XWayland compatibility depends on the compositor, as newer compositors dropped that feature. Older compositors, like Weston have XWayland, but it may be primitive or faulty.

An upcoming compositor can set its own rules, and have a compatibility for XWayland, that uses newer implementations of libx11, that have libxcb underlying it. Wayland is supposed to depend on the graphical toolkit, rather than let programs not interface directly to Wayland. XWayland is an exception to allow legacy applications to run. It seems xlib programs will go the direction of XWayland on top of a specialized compositor and Wayland. I suspect the norm will later become a compatibility layer of X on top of XWayland/Wayland for select compositors, and it will operate like X.

As for Gnome itself, I stopped using that over a decade ago. Later switched to XFCE, then JWM. Finally on to MCWM, which is lighter and accomplishes what I need. I see use of gtk implementations being still in use, but not really of Gnome.
 
kpedersen said:
I for one hope that Gnome 3 stagnates at whatever version we have now. So we don't need to constantly treadmill with increasingly worse software. Perhaps we can do what we *should* have done with Gnome 2 and freeze its version for a decade or so allowing for some actual polish.
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A fork and polish, shipped with the OpenIndiana Nimbus or Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy theme (with BSD red highlights) would be good on FreeBSD. Aside from macOS Aqua or WIn7 Aero, Gnome 2 would really something different and functional. It's a shame they got rid of it.
 
hansw said:
Well, I am not sure if it is preferred but I am using Mate now. I loved gnome but the fuzz with flatpaks I decided to not use it anymore. Gnome 4.x is lovely to work with, lot's of stuff to do with they keyboard if you invest some time.

Mate is gtk3 afaik and that has been a stable DE for me for about a year or so. I can do the same with it.
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Mate was Gnome2 itlself when first forked.
Then, changed names of its components not to conflict with Gnome3.
They dropped some apps and features as they lacked enough resource (man power) to maintain everything. Maybe this would be considered "rough edge"?
Finally, they switched to gtk3, as gtk2 was going to be EoL'ed and they had not enough resource to fork and maintain gtk2. Remaining "rough edge" would be by this, I think.
As Gnome3 was not at all usable for me, I've switched to Mate as soon as it was ported to FreeBSD.
 
I am running XFCE and Mate on the RELENG/14.0 branch of FreeBSD currently. They both work, and after dropping a custom config file in /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ My login screen is at a reasonable UI size as well.

Code: 
Section "Monitor"
        Identifier "LG 42inch Primary"
        Modeline "2560x1440_1" 312.25  2560 2752 3024 3488  1440 1443 1448 1493 -hsync +vsync #(89.5 kHz d)
        Modeline "2560x1440_2" 241.50  2560 2608 2640 2720  1440 1443 1448 1481 +hsync -vsync #(88.8 kHz e)
        Option "PreferredMode" "2560x1440_1"
        Option "DefaultModes" "false"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device "Card0"
        Monitor "LG 42inch Primary"
        SubSection "Display"
                Modes "2560x1440_1" "1920x1080"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier "Card0"
        Option "Monitor-DP-3" "LG 42inch Primary"
EndSection
 
Gnome made the Hacker News this morning for a library flaw in "libcue" that opens up Linux to RCE attacks.
Thanks for the many replies.
My use of FreeBSD is restricted to entirely to console access, no GUI at all.
 
kpedersen said:
Agreed. I had a quick look for the nimbus theme. I completely forgot I made a port for that:

https://www.freshports.org/x11-themes/nimbus/

It looks like it is a little unmaintained now. I stopped working on it when people broke Gnome.
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Yeah, I used to use that port with the matching Fluxbox theme (Vermaden's) for some years, even for a while after it got deleted out of ports. It probably still compiles. After 3 years of it being abandoned I switched to NsCDE.
 
zspider said:
Yeah, I used to use that port with the matching Fluxbox theme (Vermaden's) for some years, even for a while after it got deleted out of ports. It probably still compiles. After 3 years of it being abandoned I switched to NsCDE.
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Yeah, I believe it can still compile with minimal tweaks. Sadly the Linux ecosystem kind of regressed their theme system with the introduction of gtk3 replacing everything with a far weaker customization ability. So whilst numbus can work, most software needs Adwaita.

(I remember your username from the OpenCDE forums!)
 
Wayland and Rust are things we'll almost certainly have to get used to.

Luckily we are safe from systemd.

Pipewire might also be in our future, but there is hope that it is actually an improvement over pulseaudio.
 
I use pipewire on FreeBSD on a laptop that I sometimes use with our large TV. I had to write a little script to change the output from the laptop to HDMI, but it's pretty easy. I have a little page on it. The FreeBSD section is at the end. Note that this is for a laptop. https://srobb.net/pipewire.html

Pulseaudio of course, was another solution in search of a problem of Poettering, who, having done his damage, is now at MS. Though more than Poettering, one should blame RedHat, who enabled him for so many years.
 
kpedersen said:
Yeah, I believe it can still compile with minimal tweaks. Sadly the Linux ecosystem kind of regressed their theme system with the introduction of gtk3 replacing everything with a far weaker customization ability. So whilst numbus can work, most software needs Adwaita.

(I remember your username from the OpenCDE forums!)
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I still remember that too. :) I had it installed on my college laptop. One guy said "...wow that's old..." and walked away. There were alot of dinguses in that program who only wanted to deal with Windows stuff and would get frustrated when they had to deal with anything else.

Seems like a lifetime ago now.
 
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