Return of the King: GNOME 2 Is Making Its Way Back

Unless I am missing something GNOME Classic session or whatever they are calling it is just an official set of extensions, so in effect GNOME 2 isn't coming back. Extensions are already available if you want to modify GNOME shell to be more like GNOME 2, so in my mind very little changes.

Side note, I have never ran Linux Mint before, but I installed the 64bit MATE version and I have to say I am impressed. I can see why it is popular. Does anyone know which version MATE or Cinnamon is more popular with Mint's userbase?

I guess these extensions will be somehow grouped together and blessed by the GNOME developers as providing the one true GNOME 2-on-3 experience.

Question is: Will Cinnamon and/or MATE do it better?

Cinnamon might. MATE is a fork of GNOME 2 so it's never going to be 2 on 3.

I think if you want GNOME 2 that MATE will do it better. For better or worse GNOME decided they don't want to be a traditional desktop, they want to march to a new kind of design. Maintaining a set of extensions won't change the fact that the larger GNOME ecosystem is trying to free itself from the traditional desktop metaphor.

Side note, Linux Mint really needs the option for full disk encryption in their installer. I always find that convenient when I have installed Fedora, openSUSE, or Debian.

Fedora (and RHEL/CentOS/SL) will install alongside Windows and encrypt the entire non-Windows portion of the disk. And do it with a single passphrase. Debian and Ubuntu won't do that (they need the whole disk for full encryption). Not sure about SUSE.

I'm not running Fedora right now, but this is a powerful incentive. In Debian, I currently have encrypted swap and home and need to type the passphrase in twice. I couldn't do full-disk encryption because I dual-boot Windows.