Intro to the Gnome Flashback desktop

Conclusions

Gnome Flashback must be understood as a replacement for Gnome Shell. Other features, such as window frames drawn by the application or the isolation of settings in the official Gnome Control Center on the one hand and the Gnome Tweak Tool on the other, are clearly part of the Gnome concept, whether Flashback or Shell. I did not note any particularly good integration, nor incompatibilities, of core applications (e.g., Nautilus) with the classic desktop in this test. If you accept the fairly wide gap between expectations and reality that shows up in some places, then Flashback has already found its place in the desktop environment landscape.

Flashback only gives you a small core desktop of session management, panels, and a few other components. If your objective is the kind of modularity that makes it possible to exchange core components, then Flashback is a good choice, but not the best. If development continues to be limited to cosmetic improvements, interesting alternatives come to mind: Desktops like Xfce, LXQt, or MATE are superior to Flashback in every way when it comes to modularity, and they offer a wider choice of specific extensions.

Infos

  1. Gnome Flashback: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeFlashback
  2. MATE desktop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATE_(software)
  3. Gnome Flashback (Fedora): https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/yselkowitz/gnome-flashback/
  4. Gnome Flashback (source code): https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeFlashback#Releases
  5. JHBuild: https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Projects/Jhbuild
  6. Synapse project: https://launchpad.net/synapse-project

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