With one announcement, suddenly the prospects for the free desktop have changed.

I'm referring, of course, to Matthias Clasen's announcement that, having dropped fallback mode, GNOME will support a core of extensions that will recreate the GNOME 2 interface.

This announcement marks a major reversal of GNOME's policy. For the past two years, the project has officially defended the radical redesign introduced by GNOME 3, making few -- if any -- acknowledgments of users' complaints.

rest here