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Comment by mseepgood | Hacker News Reader

Makes sense, since no one was interested in maintaining it.

When installing GNOME3 I had a little chicken-and-egg-problem. Without installing additional drivers GNOME3 wouldn't work, so the fallback mode was handy to search the internet for the correct drivers for my chipset and install them.

But as long as they have some solution for this problem (and I think it is pretty common, because debian always installs with generic drivers for your hardware), I think it is no problem to remove the fallback mode.

Debian Wheezy will default to XFCE (I think), so you can use that instead of fallback mode for this use case.

You may find you just like using it....

IIRC the reasoning was that GNOME Shell is too big to fit on the default install CD, rather than any idealogical thing.

This is wrong, see http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/News/2012/20121...

  - Most of GNOME fits onto CD#1 again (network-less installation).
  - LXDE and Xfce now live on separate images.

Quite a recent change then!

Shame, XFCE would be a good default.

I hope that this decision causes them to re-think their position.

I guess on Linux (or any POSIX OS) it's not really necessary, since everything should still be fixable from the terminal. However it reinforces the notion that someone who can't use the terminal (= 99% of users probably) should stick to Windows or Mac - or maybe Ubuntu.

Well, I think part of the idea is that the fairly recent LLVMPipe software driver [1] should be installed by default in distros and is well supported/performant enough so you can install the drivers in the full composited desktop...

1. http://www.mesa3d.org/llvmpipe.html

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