Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 3rd Apr 2013 20:43 UTC

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Its going to be fascinating to see how they milk a usable interface out of Gnome Shell for RHEL7.
I'm not really sure how they are going to manage it. RHEL 7 is going to be based on Fedora 18, which has GNOME 3.6 (not bad) and also MATE 1.4. I suspected that bringing MATE into Fedora 18 was a key play for RHEL 7, but I've been told that GNOME 3 will be the default desktop on it, so I'm a bit confused. I guess sysadmins will have the choice of keeping people on a GNOME 2 interface with RHEL 7, using the official RHEL 7 MATE packages. That is not bad news for enterprise environments.
MATE in Fedora was introduced and continues to be maintained by volunteer developers and have nothing to do with Red Hat or RHEL. Most Fedora packages are maintained by volunteers these days and have nothing to do with Red Hat.
GNOME 3 in large part is developed by the Red Hat desktop team and will end up as default for RHEL 7 with KDE as a alternative as always.
Now EPEL add-on repository might include MATE just like it includes Xfce right now but again, that is a volunteer driven project.
Member since:
2005-06-30
More research went into designing that interface than probably anything else on the market. A coalition of Sun, HP, RedHat, and smaller companies made the usability refinements because they wanted to push into government agencies as a viable desktop solution (fascinating insight into the early development of Gnome 2, see: http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html and https://lwn.net/2001/0614/a/usability-calum.php3).
My theory is that with Sun out of existence and HP reeling, only RedHat has a vested interest in Gnome development. Except now RedHat has completely given up on desktop Linux ever happening and they are more interested in making and keeping a sustainable competitive advantage in the cloud computing/virtualization market, so they threw everything away from Gnome 2.x for something that fits that new paradigm. Correct me if I'm wrong. Its going to be fascinating to see how they milk a usable interface out of Gnome Shell for RHEL7.
Gnome 2 was sensible and flexible as a user interface and that holds true today (still the default in CentOS/RHEL/SL6). Just because something is old doesn't mean it wasn't well thought out or useful.