http://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2013/01/ ... fway-mark/
I never liked gnome because for some reason it was giving me trouble all the time, especially gnome-panel and nautilus was very. I liked some of their design decissions, like getting rid of "apply" button yet for this reason I moved to KDE and i love it. Yet the news is interesting.A new addition to GNOME 3.8 is the classic mode that is going to replace fallback mode as an alternative for users who want to keep using elements of GNOME 2, such as the minimize button, or the window list.
The reasons for replacing fallback mode have been explained here. In short, it needs to be replaced, because
it consists of barely maintained modules (gnome-panel, metacity, applets, notification-daemon,…)
it does not offer the quality and user experience that we want to deliver
keeping it (somewhat) functional keeps us from making improvements in other parts of the stack
Classic mode on the other hand, is using GNOME shell with a few extensions and few settings tweaks. New GNOME features, like the IBus integration, will ‘just work’ because classic mode is literally using the same code. We are reusing the infrastructure for defining ‘modes’ that was already present in the shell. It is used for the login screen in GNOME 3.6, for instance. The extensions and glue code that make up classic mode are being developed in the gnome-shell-extensions module.
