It will be a mod of the existing GNOME Shell user interface

Dec 9, 2012 06:37 GMT  ·  By

Matthias Clasen reported a few days ago that the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment would bring a revamped GNOME Fallback mode based entirely on GNOME Shell extensions.

So, look what the cat dragged in!  GNOME Legacy, this will be the name of the new mode of the GNOME 3.8 desktop environment, which will reassemble both GNOME Fallback and GNOME Classic modes into a single and unique GNOME 2.x style desktop for all you GNOME 2 nostalgics out there.

“We’ve decided to use the gnome-shell-extensions repository as the place where we collect the extensions that will be part of this effort.”

“If you configure with –enable-extensions=classic-mode, we will install a small set of extensions,” said Matthias Clasen in his blog post.

In this case, most of the work was done by Florian Müllner and Debarshi Ray, which are working hard these days to glue all the necessary extensions and tools to give users a working GNOME classic desktop environment.

Users who want the classic mode of the GNOME desktop, will be able to choose it right from the GDM (GNOME Display Manager) login screen, as you can see from the screenshot below.

Review image
GNOME Legacy will be available as a new session in GDM - Image courtesy of Matthias Clasen
At the moment, the team only added a traditional ALT+Tab switcher and minimize and maximize buttons. But soon, they will implement a taskbar and some form of an application menu.

In other new GNOME 3.8 will have lots of other goodies for all GNOME 3 fans, including a new way to control privacy settings, configurable shell search Python 3 porting, color tinting and focus-caret tracking in GNOME Shell, notification filtering, a new power panel, a GNOME Shell port to use XI2, support for ownCloud, and much more.

GNOME 3.8 will arrive on March 28, 2013, but until then take a look at other cool stuff implemented in GNOME 3.8.