[solved] Arch with GNOME 2?

Question

Hi everyone,
I'm a new Arch user, have been using Ubuntu for about two years now and decided this morning to give Arch a try; the install wasn't too bad, the only ultimate problem was GNOME 3... I'm hoping somebody here can tell me if there's a way to install Arch from scratch with GNOME 2 and Compiz instead of GNOME 3? I ended up removing G3 and I'm now using KDE, which is also not what I want, but certainly a million times better than G3.
I had a quick look around, and it's clear that I'm not the only one who hates G3, the old threads on this forum regarding a downgrade are pointing to a lot of empty links, hence my new thread on the matter.
I understand that it's faster to use G3 and so-on, but really it looks like it was built for people who haven't got a clue how to use a PC, and if I wanted that sort of "simplicity" then I would have brought a Mac. I absolutely DESPISE GNOME 3 and I'm really sorry if that has offended anyone.
All I want is the simple, minimal interface that I had with G2, with the cute little foot in the top left corner, my customised menus and the basic window effects; that's it. I don't want Duplo-sized icons, I don't want fancy effects and I don't want the 0.0001 seconds of speed difference or extra security and reliability, because I'd rather my PC burst into flames from some G2 bug than I ever use G3 to do my computing.
Last edited by Juln (2011-05-15 10:05:41)

Answer 1

All I want is the simple, minimal interface that I had with G2, with the cute little foot in the top left corner, my customised menus and the basic window effects; that's it. I don't want Duplo-sized icons, I don't want fancy effects and I don't want the 0.0001 seconds of speed difference or extra security and reliability, because I'd rather my PC burst into flames from some G2 bug than I ever use G3 to do my computing.
That's hilarious! lol.
G3 is actually pretty good. If you don't like gnome-shell - then simply don't use it.  Compiz works really well in G3 ( i am using the latest version 0.9.5, compiled yesterday from source).  you can customize gnome3 menus, much in the same way as Gnome2.  However, the menus are fairly slow, when i compare them to my gtk2-menu - which had zero-delay in opening.  I've actually removed gnome-panel and replaced it with other tools, as i found gnome-panel to be a bit lame in G3.....you may not mind it though.
anyways,  I wouldn't be too worried about running G3 - a lot of people are in a scramble because they aren't interested in the shell. but the shell isn't a requirement. I think the developers would just prefer that everybody uses GS. while there was talk of not having it supported in the future, i doubt that will happen ~ as we all know Canonical will be porting Unity to run on top of the gnome 3 stack. (right now it uses gnome2).  So i tend to think we should be able to run fallback, for a long time
it just might take some extra-tweaking, to get it the way you want your desktop to be. I'm now actually liking it better than gnome2, myself.  but it did take a bit of adjustment, but "under the hood" - gnome 3 has some nice features and improvements ove G2...
theming isn't too difficult either - so if you don't like fat menus/giant icons... then, you can use a theme that doesn't have that - or edit your theme instead. (i sort of did both). I'm actually working on a nice dark theme, that has gtk2 style window-decorations (narrow/thin), slim menus and some other goodies. Gtk3 - looks really great too!
jordan