In the latest Update Pack to Linux Mint Debian (UP4) released in March, MATE 1.2 and Cinnamon 1.4 were made available as well as an option called “gnome2-frozen” which allowed users to stick to Gnome 2 and skip the Update Pack altogether.
Moving forward and in preparation for Update Pack 5, this repository is now discontinued.
An rsync archive was made available for users and mirrors interested in acquiring a copy of the content of Update Pack 3. This archive will remain open for a couple of weeks and is available at the following address:
- rsync://debian.linuxmint.com::gnome2-frozen
This is our last goodbye to Gnome 2, a desktop we enjoyed working with since 2006 and which we can unfortunately no longer provide. Although there are still a few technologies which weren’t ported to newer desktops, we’re really proud of the work done by the MATE team and the results we’re getting with Cinnamon. Desktops like KDE and Xfce have also matured a lot and new solutions such as Shell and Unity provide additional alternatives to users.
The loss of Gnome 2 was a traumatic experience not only for users but for desktop distributions. Most of our focus in Linux Mint 12 and Linux Mint 13 went towards making this transition as smooth as possible. With Linux Mint 14 we’ll see the focus switch back towards iterative development/innovations and incremental improvements. Cinnamon will continue to improve and gain momentum but the focus will switch back to developing tools and improving the Linux Mint desktop experience itself, across all editions.
