The future of Gnome 2

Following forum [1], IRC and mailing list reading, I wanted to clarify Gnome team position on what will happen now that Gnome 3.8 has moved to stable.

Gnome 2 is going to be removed.

I think it cannot be more clear and there are multiple reasons for that. Let’s write a bit about those so people do not try to invent conspiracy theories:

  • Gnome 2 is not maintained anymore, nothing will make this fact go away.
  • the team is understaffed, many of our talented contributors are too busy with real life or simply quit the (Gentoo) project.
  • Bug reports are still flowing for Gnome 2 but none of us in the team are running it anymore because we do not have the extent of time needed for that.

So, yes, Gnome 3 does not suit everyone’s tastes, but most of us still love it, yes, it depends on systemd and most of us would rather keep our good ol’ openrc that did the work just fine but Gnome 2 is going away and nothing will change that.

What we recommend to people who loved Gnome 2 is to switch to alternatives like XFCE, MATE or Cinnamon because there is no point in living in the past.

[1] http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-977288.html