#6 Updated by intrigeri 2014-10-02 13:54:47

FTR, feature/jessie now uses GNOME Classic environment.

#8 Updated by sajolida 2015-03-14 11:45:37

Was this discussion ever raised on tails-dev, tails-ux, or a monthly meeting before being marked as resolved?

I’m asking this because from the content of those tickest only I’m not sure to understand what are the advantages of GNOME Classic over the default GNOME Shell theme + the following extensions:

• Applications menus
• Places status indicator
• Window list
• Workspace indicator

On the other hand, it seems like use GNOME Classic:

• Changes the overall look and feel of the desktop. I personally don’t care that much but this kind of stuff can usually produce more noise and complains that needed. So I’m in favor of not changing them without a good reason.
• Makes it harder to gradually disable one or several of those extensions in the future (if the need arise for some reason or if we want to be closer to the default GNOME Shell experience).

#9 Updated by intrigeri 2015-03-14 12:37:35

> Was this discussion ever raised on tails-dev, tails-ux, or a monthly meeting before being marked as resolved?

Yes. It’s been discussed a bit in the “The future of GNOME Fallback in Tails” thread on tails-dev@: I’ve sent an update about it last November, summed up my opinion, pointed to Feature #7558, and wrote “And if you want to take the lead on that discussion, better do it ASAP, because a lot of work we’re doing these days on this front relies on GNOME Classic to some degree, and the more we wait, the more work will need to be re-done”. Nobody reacted, and since then the work I was talking of has been done.

There was lots more resistance to the idea of switching to GNOME Shell, so I’ve tried to find a reasonable compromise. So, when the only one of us who I remember arguing in favour of GNOME Shell wrote (Feature #7558#note-8) “GNOME Classic is quite a good compromise between recent OS UX and what we currently have”, I thought we had found the sweet spot that would avoid going through lengthy and painful discussions among ourselves, let alone with angry users.

> I’m asking this because from the content of those tickest only I’m not sure to understand what are the advantages of GNOME Classic over the default GNOME Shell theme + the following extensions:

The main (and perhaps only) advantage I see is GNOME Classic provides a colour scheme that’s closer to traditional desktops, and may be less likely to raise tons of “OMG” -style complains by users and developers. Not that I would agree with these complains, but I simply want to avoid spending too much energy in such conflicts.

> On the other hand, it seems like use GNOME Classic:

> * Changes the overall look and feel of the desktop. I personally don’t care that much but this kind of stuff can usually produce more noise and complains that needed. So I’m in favor of not changing them without a good reason.

I’m not at all convinced that GNOME Shell (+ these extensions) would produce less noise and complains than GNOME Classic.

> * Makes it harder to gradually disable one or several of those extensions in the future (if the need arise for some reason or if we want to be closer to the default GNOME Shell experience).

ACK.

=> If you feel that this decision was the wrong one, and/or was made too much in a hurry, feel free to reboot the decision making process. I personally don’t care much what we finally ship, as both proposals will make me happy. The only thing I care about is the time I and others have already invested in work based on GNOME Classic, so please make sure that the new discussion isn’t disconnected from the practical question of “who’ll do the bonus work if it’s decided to ship GNOME Shell?”.

I personally would not enthusiastically do that work, given:

• I made it very clear 4 months ago what my timeline was, and have been working based on the GNOME Classic assumption since then.
• We have something in feature/jessie that feels good enough to me, so I have a hard time seeing this as a blocker.
• I have lots of blockers to resolve for Tails/Jessie.

#10 Updated by sajolida 2015-03-15 16:15:24

> Yes. It’s been discussed a bit in the “The future of GNOME Fallback
> in Tails” thread on tails-dev@.

Indeed I found that again.

> I thought we had found the
> sweet spot that would avoid going through lengthy and painful
> discussions among ourselves, let alone with angry users.

I definitely don’t want to do that. Too bad I didn’t jump in the
discussion back then. I think at that time I didn’t realize that we
could achieve the same thing with the default theme + a bunch of extensions.

> The main (and perhaps only) advantage I see is GNOME Classic provides
> a colour scheme that’s closer to traditional desktops, and may be
> less likely to raise tons of “OMG” -style complains by users and
> developers. Not that I would agree with these complains, but I simply
> want to avoid spending too much energy in such conflicts.

Honestly, we didn’t face so many complains when switching to Wheezy, and
that was the hard one to do.

> I’m not at all convinced that GNOME Shell (+ these extensions) would
> produce less noise and complains than GNOME Classic.

I think that it will bring more noise because it looks more different to
what we already have. But I don’t think it will be problematic.

Anyway, sorry for the small side-tracking and I don’t feel like we did
something wrong and should redo the discussion. We anyway need to find a
better way of timing and exchanging between code and UX people in
general. But I’m far from having a perfect solution for that either, so
let’s take it easy :)

#11 Updated by sajolida 2016-03-18 10:59:26

Discussion reactivated on https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2016-March/010477.html.