New Debian-based Classic Gnome Desktop OS
 

For Classic Gnome lovers and Desktop users everywhere it is worth giving SolusOS a test run in a spare part of your hard drive.

SolusOS is reviewed here:

http://www.linuxandlife.com/2012/05/...me-debian.html

I have tried it and it is very impressive. It is Debian based and, like Mint, has all the multimedia etc included.

Ikey Doherty of SolusOS comments:
“We'll be using Gnome 3 classic mode with a lot of modifications. It will look and act exactly the same as our Gnome 2 setup, requiring no hardware acceleration. I've begun porting the older panel/applet libraries to use GTK3 and D-BUS meaning we won't lose any of the functionality previously found.
Long story short, you'll be using the latest system and you won't be able to tell the difference".

SolusOS also has a First Run wizard with firewall and graphics driver options.

I only had one problem and that was with flash crashing.
There is a simple solution however.

In terminal:

Hi there,

I'm always somewhat annoyed about the name tags, because for me, "Classic Gnome" is Gnome 2.x, not Gnome 3.

Then what's the point of having Gnome 3 anyway? Let's stay with Gnome 2 which is well-developed and mature.

[X] Doc CPU

Yes, it is. The point is that Gnome 2 will never be updated again (besides some security updates from Debian or Red Hat) and more and more applications change to GTK3, so you need it anyways. Gnome 3 per se is nothing bad, most people are simply confusing it with Gnome Shell, which has started all the controversies. Making a desktop that works like Gnome 2 based on Gnome 3 is going forward instead of running on the spot and basically what the Gnome people should have done, IMHO.
Now the SolusOS people are doing that, nice, good news for people that like Gnome 2.

Hi there,

and that's exactly what many people want. Look, I've been a Windows user for nearly twenty years, so I'll use an analogy from the Windows world.
There's the Windows OS itself. In my assessment, Windows reached its optimum with Windows XP. So I'll stay with XP and won't update any more.
There's Microsoft Office, which reached its peak with Office 97, after which it constantly decayed. So I'll stay with Office 97 (besides using Open Office) and won't update any further.

And that's what I demand: Once a piece of software has reached a degree of maturity, recognition, approval and prevalence, it shouldn't be changed any more (except bug fixes). If you change a significant property of the software, it's gonna be a different product.

Yes, maybe. And it's probably Ubuntu that contributed most of all to this confusion by throwing Gnome 3, Gnome Shell and their Unity desktop into a melting pot, so that the average user can hardly distinguish them.

[X] Doc CPU

The point is Gnome 2 is dead upstream, and over time will more than likely have security issues. Not that Gnome 2 was great and Gnome 3 sucks. Using any software that is no longer being maintain is just plain stupid.


Even Debian will stop using Gnome 2 once Wheezy is released next year.

TobiSGD,

You are absolutely right.

Doc CPU,

I agree. Add in Mate and Cinnamon and its even more confusing.

I am looking forward to the SolusOS next incarnation, OS-2.

I have just discovered this link to an earlier review of SolusOS which gives useful background information on Ikey Doherty, who was the driving force behind LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition):

http://www.mikeermel.com/

Extract:

"What Ikey has decided to do is to provide a rock-solid foundation for SolusOS, which is based on Debian Squeeze. And instead of trying to bring in new desktop environments, SolusOS is using GNOME 2.30, which gives everyone a familiar GNOME 2 environment that is also very stable.
But where SolusOS really shines is how it provides a steady foundation, but uses current releases of software packages.
So everyone using SolusOS is getting the best of both worlds — a very stable distro that offers current and fresh applications".

All the Gnome nonsense caused me to switch to LXDE (e.g. Lubuntu). My computers are fast again.

I love Gnome 2.x and it's great to see some distro's still using it but, nothing lasts forever. I have switched from Ubuntu 10.10 to my own homebuilt distro running Debian Testing/Sid with XFCE and its as good as Gnome ever was. The recently released XFCE 4.10 will give an even better experience once it reaches the main distro's out there. As always with Linux it's choice, if unsatisfied with a certained product then move on and try something else...

I tried Solus last week and gave it 8/10 in my review on this site. I'm not so sure about their idea of customising Gnome 3 in next year's release, though. Messing about with a desktop can often have unfortunate results, as I'm currently finding with ROSA's take on KDE.

As for security issues in Gnome 2, Red Hat will be supporting it until the end of the decade, so I expect they'll sort something out.

Personally, I think all the new gimmickry is rubbish. GUIs have been around since 1973, so it's reasonable to think that the ergonomics were well sorted out before Gnome 3 and Unity came along. But who cares? We've got Xfce and Mate.

David McCann,

I liked your review of SolusOS at:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/review...p?product=2168

and I agree that the installer could be improved. Several Linux OSs fall down in this area. The Ubuntu installer is one of the best IMO.

The only thing I wonder with this is where do the security patches go to so the other distros still using Gnome 2, that don't have the dev teams that Red Hat and Debian do, get the security patches from? I'm not sure they go to Gnome because Gnome doesn't, as far as I am aware, have any Gnome 2 left on their site.

Fuduntu expressed the intention of keeping Gnome 2 going in that way, so it is possible. Perhaps they get a home-user subscription! I think that the success of Mate has made Gnome 2 irrelevant, though. I must confess that I was skeptical at first, but the Mint and Salix versions show that it's now mature.

RedHat releases the sources to all of their software, and it's pretty simple to pull and merge them when necessary.

The only GTK3 apps out there currently are pretty much just GNOME 3 and Rhythmbox. GIMP, Firefox etc all build against GTK2. We don't even have GTK3 in our repository and we don't have any "out of date software" that uses GTK - unless you count GNOME itself. :)

I never said that GTK2 is used by outdated software. What I think is simple (sounds funny): GTK2 is done. Get over it. Future (and I mean future) applications will use GTK3. GIMP is aiming to it for GIMP 3 (the version after 2.10), some other apps are already in transition state and I see nothing bad in it. I personally think that none of the people that are complaining about the "new Gnome" mean really Gnome 3, they think about the mess that the Gnome developers name "Gnome Shell". They (the Gnome developers) simply forgot that sometimes it is better to improve what you already have than "inventing" something that your designers say is better. What Gnome 2 users wanted from the Gnome developers for the next version was an improvement. What they got would be called a total conversion in the gaming scene. Not Gnome related. In my eyes (and I don't use Gnome, I am just a spectator) epic fail. But worse, instead to learn of their mistakes (and may be just listen to their users) they just go ahead.
This is why I love open source. That was bad, but the developers don't (want to) see it, so some people take it up and try to make it better.

A whole bunch of distros, including Ubuntu and Mint, wouldn't exist if there wouldn't be a desire to make it better. Of course we could make the applications to use GTK2 forever. The question is: Why? Why don't we still use KDE 3? Or XFCE 4.2? Time goes on. Go with it. Or use twm, pure experience, no progression.

That's the greatest thing about OSS, it's never "done". Just because the GNOME team dumped it and all the people that were using it for OMG SHINY, that doesn't mean it is dead.

MATE, Firefox, Thunderbird, Tomboy, Banshee, Pidgin, GIMP, and many other mainline applications still build against it. Will they in the future? *shrug*

It is a respectable amount of work to migrate applications from GTK 2 to GTK 3, it's going to take a while to port them.

They do today though, a year after GNOME 2 "died".

Possibly, Mozilla has been working on it for a while now too. A few apps will even build against either.

There is a lot of truth to that, but GNOME Shell is "GNOME 3" because that is what gives the first impression.

I know from experience talking to some of them that they didn't forget. Some of them don't deserve the power they have been given because they don't understand what they are designing, others just don't care about their users.

They are forging ahead ignoring those with more practical knowledge and experience telling them they are wrong (Linus for example). I've had conversations with one of their developers that believes a closed laptop lid will cause a machine to catch fire. Seriously..

You can add mine to that list. ;)

FYI - Trinity is a KDE 3 fork, MATE is a GNOME 2 fork, and XFCE 4.10 is still GTK2. ;)

Thanks for your reply to my previous post. I'll look further into that.

I don't know about all the others in this list but MATE is working towards, at least they posted this on their website, GTK3 integration.

Their integration means side by side installation with GNOME 3.