Classic view in Gnome3

Following the recent problems with the gnome desktop I'm back on KDE4 and pleasently suprised to find that most of the bling can now be disabled ... Classic view in KDE4

While all the bling being added to desktops these days may be atractive to some people, there are major reasons for not wanting all the unnecessary animation. On windows installs, one of the first tweaks was always to switch off things like 'fade' on windows opening. When one clicks on 'open' there is no need for anything other than the application opening. Adding 'themes' which change the position of key functions make remote support something of a nightmare as well, so switching back to 'classic' has always been high on the set-up list.

The changes made to KDE4 and then Gnome3 do nothing for the production user. While some people may have time to wait for 'bouncy' windows to settle down, this has little practical use to anyone. KDE's decision not to provide a 'classic' mode resulted in my switching over to Gnome2, and the the arrival of the same distractions on Gnome3 were just irritating. At least someone was listening to the complaints to KDE's stance, and so 'rollback' option demonstrates that there is no reason that a classic mode can't be retained for those of use who have no need to re-learn how to use the desktop every few years. Ubuntu have implemented a tidy 'Gnome classic' facility package, but this is missing from Fedora where one has to hack the desktop configuration to enable it, and then add a couple of additional packages.

The crib sheet is provided on the fedoraproject forums ... gnome fallback Fedora17 although the GUI note needs to be updated to say, Click on User Name -> System Settings -> System/Details -> Graphics to enable fallback mode. This is then enhanced by adding gnome-panel, gnome-shell-extension-alternate-tab and gnome-tweak-tool packages. Running the tweak-tool allows the restoration of file manager handling on the desktop (Desktop->first button)

There are a couple more options available to help with this. GNOME Shell Frippery provides a few fixes, but I don't think these help when one can reposition thing anyway. There is also the cinnamon desktop, which I've not had time to play with yet.

Another aspect of the new desktop's is the switch to using the top edge of the display rather than the bottom. I have reached an age when glasses are essential, and while vary-focals are replaced by reading glasses on the screens, ones eyes are naturally working on the bottom half of the screen, and one physically has to look up every time on needs to view the top edge. Currently I'm not sure on the correct way to handle this, but having found the dconf-editor while enabling fallback mode, I simply hacked the entries so that everything was on the bottom-panel and removed the top-panel entry. The one thing I then found was the need to use <Alt> with <Right Click> to get access to the move function, then tidying up the layout is a lot easier. 

Cinnamon desktop has been put forward as additional help, but as yet I've not decided if this is necessary. The machine without cinnamon seems a little tidier than the one with it enabled so I've disabled cinnamon again and dropped back to a simple 'fallback' copy of the gnome desktop. I'm using the private repo at home:vnlweb to provide the latest cinnamon and also nemo. Nemo restores the classic facilitries for server management and is a replacement for nautilus on my current setup and is almost completly integrated except for the connect to server on the places menu.

This now gets us to the themeing problems, and after much hair pulling it's now at least under control. Gnome 3.6 introduces a new element of incompetance by changing the way that the scroll bar works on SOME applications! Fortunatly it's possible to simply switch off the new action so it returns to the same as all the other applications. ADD NOTES This just leaves finding 'a' theme that works across the various libraries, and I've got a revised clearlooks theme that provides gnome-shell, gtk2 and gtk3 styles along with a matching Qt4 style, so all the various applications both look and work the same way. The private download of Clearlooks-Phenix 3 provides the missing gtk3 element.

This just leaves a problem with the screen resolution. Another niggle with the newer builds of Linux and even XP these days. As the majority of my machines are either remote with no attached display or linked to KVM swtches, the insistance these days that an 'inteligent' screen is attached is another poor decision. Even NOMODESET does not seem to work these days, so one has to patch cables direct to the monitors while booting up to get the higher resolution. With SUSE the current builds do now allow resetting things via xrandr commands from a display.sh script, but at the moment there is a problem getting this working with Fedora17 as adding the extra mode switches the display off, something which should not happen until the current mode is actually changed.