[PLUG] gnome2-like behavior from gnome3?

Tom tgrom.automail at nuegia.net
Wed Dec 25 22:29:35 UTC 2019


On Fri, 20 Dec 2019 14:54:25 -0800
Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:

> My first encounter with gnome3 was disturbing - way too
> much eye candy and gesture dependence and memory footprint.
> So, I stayed with older gnome2-using distros, but support
> for those is vanishing.
> 
> I plan to use gnome2-emulating Mate with newer distros
> (specifically, from Scientific Linux 6 to S.L.7, then to
> CentOS 8 someday).
> 
> However, I vaguely recall being told that gnome3 can be
> configured to behave very much like gnome2. 
> 
> Is this true?  WHERE CAN I LEARN MORE????
> 
> If gnome3 is indeed capable of this miraculous compatibility,
> how much larger is the memory footprint and CPU usage?
> 
> I plan to keep using my older Thinkpad laptops with full
> height screens and real keyboards, but those are limited
> to 4 GB RAM and 8-year-old lower-speed CPUs. 
> 
> If gnome2-configured gnome3 is too bloated (and when has
> software ever become smaller and more efficient?), I'll
> stick with Mate, stone knives, and bearskins.
> 
> Keith
> 
> PS:  I am very very NOT interested in learning how to use
> /your/ personal favorite alternative distro.  I am having
> trouble enough remembering how to use the distro family
> I've been using for decades, much less cope with SystemD. 
> I'd rather spend my time learning about cosmology.
> 

Try XFCE 4.12, LXDE, or IceWM. Give Devuan ASCII
https://devuan.org a try in a virtual machine which comes with XFCE4.12
by default and no systemd. At least just to try it out so you know
what you'd be targeting if you went down that route. I'd advise staying
away from anything GTK3 based as themes are still absolutely broken
https://linuxreviews.org/GNOME_Developers_have_Made_Their_Moves_against_Themes
and the overall toolkit is still largely unpolished, with various
usability bugs like scroll bars not showing up properly and forced
animations, increased system footprint, and less portability between
systems. Compound this with the fact the GNOME developers don't seem to
care about polishing their releases and are instead working on GTK4
when GTK3 is still a broken mess. The GNOME developers also seem to
have a complete disregard for any desktop programs and environments
that are not GNOME3. 

There are lots of good libraries for developing gtk2 like perl-gtk2 on
CPAN and wxglade.

There's also QT which is serviceable but it's largely a C++ codebase
and while pretty good still seems like a mild step down from gtk2. Not
as much as GTK3.

I think it's important to note that gtk+2 is called the Gimp toolkit
and GTK3 is called the GNOME toolkit. Where, If your not running GNOME3
or like GNOME3's ideals your in for a bad time.

I have spent a great deal of time on finding myself a good solution to
this problem over years and have settled on forking and maintaining
myself various standalone gtk2 and QT components to have a complete
desktop environment which I use as a daily driver. I would be more than
happy to share any software and recommendations I have running. I've
got my entire system up and running smooth on GCC9 and glibc 2.29-r3 as
well as the Devuan base system.

-- 



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