Overview

GNOME Flashback is a session for GNOME 3 which was initially called "GNOME Fallback", and shipped as a stand-alone session in Debian and Ubuntu. It provides a similar user experience to the GNOME 2.x series sessions. The differences to the MATE project is that GNOME Flashback uses GTK+ 3 and tries to follow the current GNOME development by integrating recent changes of the GNOME libraries. The development currently lags behind a little but a lot of progress has been made and most importantly many open bugs have been fixed.

Currently GNOME Flashback consists of the following components:

GnomePanel: This component provides a flexible panel. One or more of these panels can be added to the screen and can be populated with multiple applets to open application, indicators for sound and network, a clock applet with date, time and weather and many more.
Metacity: The window manager of GNOME Flashback, optionally other window managers such as mutter can be used but Metacity is the one that's officially supported. Recently Metacity has been ported to GTK+ 3 and gained the side-by-side window tiling feature that is also available in GNOME Shell.
GnomeApplets: This component provides a collection of useful applets for the GNOME Panel. See also a list of third-party applets.
Flashback module: A new module since September 2014. It provides session files, background features, a sound applet and shutdown dialogs.

Flashback Module

GNOME Flashback needs a couple to utility tasks to be performed to make the desktop useful. These are collected and provided through the flashback component and they include:

Background drawing (which was previously handled by nautilus)
A sound applet library (which adds a volume applet to the notification area to control the sound settings)
Shutdown dialogs to shutdown or suspend the computer.

Releases

The list of GNOME Flashback releases can be found on the Releases page.

History

The GNOME Flashback team was born in December 2012 out of a shared desire to continue work on the discontinued "GNOME Fallback" mode based on Metacity and GNOME Panel. People from downstream and derived desktops that have shared interests (e.g. the MATE team) are invited to join the GNOME Flashback team, and share the burden of keeping this technology useful.

Development

Building, Running, Testing

If you want to use the latest development code in order to hack on one of the modules or to test recent changes from other contributors, you will need to build the GNOME Flashback modules and you must also configure your environment such that you can login into a session that runs your built modules.

The Projects/GnomeFlashback/Development page lists some general instructions on how to do that.

Reporting bugs

If you want to report a bug about Flashback, please file a ticket in the issue tracker.

If you have a patch to contribute, please create a merge request.

Roadmap

TODO: Update the roadmap.

Contact

Discussion forum
#gnome-flashback IRC channel on irc.gnome.org
Dmitry Shachnev, Ubuntu and Debian Packager
Alberts Muktupāvels Developer, Maintainer
Sebastian Geiger Developer