Is gnome 2 still available for v.12?

I do not want to have anything to do with gnome 3. Can I still install gnome 2 under release 12 or in the worst case scenario Mate?
 
You can install Mate. The gnome 2 stuff was removed long time ago.

By the way, the most packages are not dependent on the freebsd version.
 
None of the above 2 comments answer the question. Gnome 3 is a giant failure. Gnome 2 is the last working gnome. Since according to
the most packages are not dependent on the freebsd version.
packages do not depend on release, gnome 2 should not have been removed completely. This is very disappointing and unfortunate that some have an urge to destroy the working software and replace it with the one that does not work.
 
None of the above 2 comments answer the question. Gnome 3 is a giant failure. Gnome 2 is the last working gnome. Since according to packages do not depend on release, gnome 2 should not have been removed completely. This is very disappointing and unfortunate that some have an urge to destroy the working software and replace it with the one that does not work.

The problem is Gnome 2 not being supported by it's upstream anymore so to keep it around someone would have to maintain it. I guess you could always resurrect it. All it takes is someone to fix bugs and keep it compatible with the current environment. It's up to you.
 
packages do not depend on release, gnome 2 should not have been removed completely. This is very disappointing and unfortunate that some have an urge to destroy the working software and replace it with the one that does not work.

Whilst I agree with you, it is unfortunately something that cannot be changed. The Gnome project died many years ago and a new project (called Gnome 3) just happens to share the same name.

For your next environment, make sure to choose something small and light so when the same thing happens again, you can maintain it yourself and unchain yourself from the self-destructive nature that is effectively the Linux community (get ready for Wayland! XD).

I personally think it was an incorrect choice from the FreeBSD developer community to not focus on making Gnome 2 polished and stable but instead chasing an always broken Gnome 3 but at the same time I do not have time to actually solve that by maintaining Gnome 2 myself. Remember, Gnome 2 was also Linuxy software, meaning it was still rather bloated and had so much interdependence making it quite hard to maintain.

shkhln is very much correct. At this point, just use whatever crap you can get working. And if that gets destroyed by the upstream folk, just jump ship to whatever is still the most afloat XD
 
Whilst I agree with you, it is unfortunately something that cannot be changed. The Gnome project died many years ago and a new project (called Gnome 3) just happens to share the same name.

Exactly. I doubt there are many people here that actually like Gnome3 but Gnome2 is dead and unless someone wants to invest a lot of time it will stay this way.

I personally think it was an incorrect choice from the FreeBSD developer community to not focus on making Gnome 2 perfect and instead chasing an always broken Gnome 3 but at the same time I do not have time to actually solve that by maintaining Gnome 2 myself.

Maintaining Gnome2 is probably just to big of a task. Mate has tried sticking with GTK2 and it didn't take long for them to give in so maintaining vanilla Gnome2 is likely somewhat equally problematic. By now many applications have removed support. It's sad, i agree, but at a certain point patching stuff back in (or out) becomes just to much of a hassle.

shkhln is very much correct. At this point, just use whatever crap you can get working. And if that gets destroyed by the upstream folk, just jump ship to whatever is still the most afloat XD

Yep. Either that or switch to something custom where you have some kind of control over the "evolution" of your DE.
 
The problem is Gnome 2 not being supported by it's upstream anymore so to keep it around someone would have to maintain it. I guess you could always resurrect it. All it takes is someone to fix bugs and keep it compatible with the current environment. It's up to you.
Nothing - not just gnome 2 or [substitute any software package out there] is being supported. There is no such thing as support in free, open source software world. Gnome 2 was functional, useful, and contained few bugs. Its UI was intuitive and user-friendly. Gnome 3 broke all of that and spat in the face of its user base, Linus included. Since then many turned to alternative DMs, KDE 4 included. Then KDE 5 came and broke almost everything. There is nowhere to run, nothing to jump to. Gnome 3 and KDE 5 are badly broken, and the res of DMs out there are half-baked, half-ass.
Gnome 2 did not have to be erased from the repos. Just leave it there. Those who understand user-friendly UIs would use it quietly, without bothering anyone. When a loud pronouncement on the interwebs is made that some software is "end of life" or "out of support" it does not mean that it has to be immediately erased from repos. It would not hurt anyone by being here. Both FreeBSD and Linux repos are full of obsolete software that no one uses. Just leave Gnome 2 be.
 
Both FreeBSD and Linux repos are full of obsolete software that no one uses. Just leave Gnome 2 be.

The problem was that Gnome 2 required a library (lets say, libgnome-thing) and Gnome 3 required a library (also called libgnome-thing). They are called the same thing but are very different. Only one can exist. Now imagine Gnome is made up of 100+ of these bloody things. It ends up being that you can only keep *one* collection of packages called "Gnome" in a repository. Mate did a fairly good job of renaming and relocating everything but then got bored and starting doing weird things.

KDE 4 included

Heh, I remember that. Gnome 2 and KDE 3.5 used to be fairly evenly matched. It was the age old argument of which one was better. Then KDE 4 came out and Gnome 2 no longer had any competition. KDE was completely out of the running and Gnome 2 became *the* Linux desktop. It is only when Gnome 3 killed Gnome 2 that KDE 4 started becoming an option again because they were now both such crap offerings, they were evenly matched.

Desktops environments are pretty much doomed. My advice would be to focus your interests elsewhere. If you really are passionate about desktop environments and GUI usability, then perhaps have a go at making your own. But don't rely on the Linux world to provide you with something good. It won't happen.
 
Heh, I remember that. Gnome 2 and KDE 3.5 used to be fairly evenly matched. It was the age old argument of which one was better. Then KDE 4 came out and Gnome 2 no longer had any competition. KDE was completely out of the running and Gnome 2 became *the* Linux desktop. It is only when Gnome 3 killed Gnome 2 that KDE 4 started becoming an option again because they were now both such crap offerings, they were evenly matched.

Couldn't be more right than this. Right on the money.
 
Nothing - not just gnome 2 or [substitute any software package out there] is being supported. There is no such thing as support in free, open source software world.

Really? I see a ton of software with bugtrackers and developers that read and act upon them. I also see port/package maintainers pushing updates, fixing things that got broken, improving integration, ... Maybe i suffer from some kind of optical illusion?

Gnome 2 was functional, useful, and contained few bugs. Its UI was intuitive and user-friendly.

Exactly, it was. There is this little thing called bit rot and if that isn't taken care of things that used to work yesterday don't necessarily work tommorow. That is especially true for projects the size and complexity of something like Gnome and Gnome2's bit rot hasn't been taken care of in a long long time.

Gnome 3 broke all of that and spat in the face of its user base, Linus included. Since then many turned to alternative DMs, KDE 4 included. Then KDE 5 came and broke almost everything. There is nowhere to run, nothing to jump to. Gnome 3 and KDE 5 are badly broken,

I am not disagreeing here but does this change the current state in any way?

and the res of DMs out there are half-baked, half-ass.

Well, i am actually quite happy with my desktop (which hasn't changed in ages as it's luckily none of the above) but that's obviously a question of personal preference.

Gnome 2 did not have to be erased from the repos. Just leave it there.

Why leave something that's very, very, very likely not working anymore (reason: see above)? Also it's seriously easy to get it back. Just get the old port and see if you can get it to build. If you can you just got your beloved Gnome2 and if you can't you know the reason why it isn't there. My bets are obviously on the second outcome but then i haven't tried it so why don't you give it a shot? There is likely other people that would be interested in this and if it's really still working i guess there wouldn't be any serious opposition to officially including it again either.

Those who understand user-friendly UIs would use it quietly, without bothering anyone. When a loud pronouncement on the interwebs is made that some software is "end of life" or "out of support" it does not mean that it has to be immediately erased from repos.

Well then go ahead and prove that it really is just "unfairly" deleted.

It would not hurt anyone by being here.

As long as it works it obviously wouldn't. If it only works halfway with noone taking care of getting it back in shape it'll hurt people though. As in wasting their time trying and likely also wasting other peoples time with support requests for something that simply won't work.

Both FreeBSD and Linux repos are full of obsolete software that no one uses.

That's true but the software usually still works. If it becomes known that it doesn't and there is noone to take care of the bugs it's gone.

Just leave Gnome 2 be.

Let it rest in peace would be more appropriate in my opinion but don't let that stop you. I'd love to be proven wrong. Here is the port: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/x11/gnome2/?pathrev=372767. Good luck.
 
Let it rest in peace would be more appropriate in my opinion but don't let that stop you. I'd love to be proven wrong. Here is the port: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/x11/gnome2/?pathrev=372767. Good luck.

user00, I don't know how much experience you have fixing broken software? For a single person it might be a fair bit of work maintaining Gnome 2. My recommendation is to distill the core components out and ditch the rest (many were never working). If you do tackle this task, make no mistake, it will be very much appreciated by the community!

If you can reduce dependencies down quite far to *just* Gtk+2 it may even stand a chance of being much easier to maintain in the future. Just bare in mind to consider things like tracking file system changes, terminal emulation and thing like that all starting to require dependencies unless you code it *all* yourself.
 
user00, I don't know how much experience you have fixing broken software? For a single person it might be a fair bit of work maintaining Gnome 2. My recommendation is to distill the core components out and ditch the rest (many were never working). If you do tackle this task, make no mistake, it will be very much appreciated by the community!

If you can reduce dependencies down quite far to *just* Gtk+2 it may even stand a chance of being much easier to maintain in the future. Just bare in mind to consider things like tracking file system changes, terminal emulation and thing like that all starting to require dependencies unless you code it *all* yourself.

As much as i'd like seeing this happen i doubt he will try it. From his posts it seems like he is working on the assumption that Gnome2 would still be the same today as it was when it got removed 6 years ago and, like you say, fixing all the (very, very likely existing) problems won't be a small/easy task. Again i'd love to be proven wrong and might even help a bit if there seems to be at least a somewhat realistic chance to get anywhere with it. I don't have high hopes though.
 
True, it really would be a monstrous task.

I did make a (fairly laughable) attempt in the past. The project was called "Imp" and it was really just to see if I could strip all the crap and pretty much have just the desktop (metacity, menu bars, desktop, file manager). Even this slightly small scope had to be abandoned (I gave myself a week) because everything dragged in everything haha.

Writing one from scratch would be more feasible IMO.
 
True, it really would be a monstrous task.

I did make a (fairly laughable) attempt in the past. The project was called "Imp" and it was really just to see if I could strip all the crap and pretty much have just the desktop (metacity, menu bars, desktop, file manager). Even this slightly small scope had to be abandoned (I gave myself a week) because everything dragged in everything haha.

Writing one from scratch would be more feasible IMO.

Yes, decoupling components of any one of the bigger DEs is very likely to be quite painful. Building a clone from ground up would not only be more feasable but also likely open up a couple interesting options. Like writing most of the GUI parts in some scripting language which would speed up development by a huge margin. It's not like this is awfully performance critical anyways. That would pretty much leave the GTK2/3 problem to be solved in some way.
 
So, not sure why Mate` is not OK - it is a fork of Gnome 2 and my personal favorite DE. Gnome 2 died when the Gnome devs moved on to Gnome 3. Just like KDE 3 died when the KDE devs moved to KDE 4, et cetera, et cetera...

I was a heavy Gnome 2 user and tester back in the day and I really like Mate`. That's subjective though. I don't see why a resurrection of Gnome 2 would be any different than Mate` other than a name change.
 
So, not sure why Mate` is not OK - it is a fork of Gnome 2 and my personal favorite DE. Gnome 2 died when the Gnome devs moved on to Gnome 3. Just like KDE 3 died when the KDE devs moved to KDE 4, et cetera, et cetera...

I was a heavy Gnome 2 user and tester back in the day and I really like Mate`. That's subjective though. I don't see why a resurrection of Gnome 2 would be any different than Mate` other than a name change.

To be honest i know neither Gnome2 nor Mate well enough to really judge that. I basically like the idea because the rewrite approach seems like it could be a cool project. There is alot of stuff that could be tried while still catering to original look and feel. Stitching together the classic Gnome2 sources is not really of interest to me though but if someone wants to attempt that (for whatever reason) i might help a bit here or there.

I am kinda curious though how the GTK situation looks right now in regards to Mate. From what i gathered on the side it seems the project has given up on GTK2. Is that correct? If so to what extend? I figure supporting both versions of GTK is pretty much unavoidable in 2020 but i wonder how the basic DE handles that. It might be somewhat of a personal thing but to me GTK2 vs. GTK3 is pretty much a huge deal.
 
I believe Mate` is now fully GTK3 but I could be wrong. I tend to not delve that deep into things like that and just use it. To me, the look and feel, GTK elements aside, are the same as Gnome 2, thus my comments.

Agree - sticking together Gnome 2 sources would probably be impossible because of deprecated library support, etc. Which is why I believe the Mate` project exists in the first place: to keep the Gnome 2 project alive, at least in spirit.
 
Mate looks to be doing a good job. My main reservation with it is that they are just "keeping up" rather than trying to future-proof themselves.

What I mean by this is that they are potentially being strung along (by effectively Gnome 3) in the technologies they are using. So they updated to Gtk3, they needed to support systemd-logind, they are investing time in supporting Wayland, etc. Whilst this is all great stuff (and does go some way to keep it working so I commend them for that), I can't help but feel they should be trying to simplify the project rather than dragging in yet more technologies. Especially since none of these examples were particularly necessary.

Put it this way. The number of rough edges is actually growing because of this blind march in progress in terms of the latest Linuxy stuff.
 
At this point I am going to dig out one of my older off-topic threads and dust it off:

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/adapting-a-games-jam.75479/

Desktop Environment Jam 2020 (Has a nice ring to it?)

If a number of us (preferably each of the 24,194 members on the forum XD) put our heads together and wrote a small DE component or utility each, we would have one fairly substantial FreeBSD desktop environment ;)

(it would likely turn into a cluster-fsck in terms of project management, but it would at least make a fun experiment!)
 
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