This post was made with an older stylesheet

RHEL 7 the upcoming enterprise Linux of Red Hat is scheduled for the second half of 2013. Around half year ago Red Hat made known that they were going to ship GNOME 3 for their desktop, so it was easy to guess that they were going to use version 3.8 since that was going to be the latest GNOME version at the time for RHEL 7 Beta.

Shell 3.8 Classic Mode in Fedora 19

According to Denise Dumas, director of software engineering at Red Hat, RHEL 7 is going to use a tweaked version of Shell Classic

We think that people who are accustomed to Gnome 2 will use classic mode until they’re ready to experiment with modern mode. Classic mode is going to be the default for RHEL 7, and we’re in the final stages now. We’re tweaking it and having people experiment with it. The last thing we want to do is disrupt our customers’ workflows. I think it’s been hard for the Gnome guys, because they really, really love modern mode, because that’s where their hearts are. But they’ve done a great job putting together classic mode for us, and I think it’s going to keep people working on RHEL 5, 6 and 7 who don’t want to retrain their fingers each time they switch operating systems — I think classic mode’s going to be really helpful for them.

Source: http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/2240185580/Red-Hat-discloses-RHEL-roadmap

Red Hat’s summit is currently in progress and new features will be revealed to the public.. Ooh yes, Red Hat is so famous to keep their future plans secret -at least whatever has to do with their precious RHEL :)

So a question here is why Classic instead of Default Shell; Does that means that RH guys recognize a small failure of Shell to be acceptable from their customers? The question is quite complex and we need to keep on mind two facts.

First, many of the guys that held high positions in Red Hat and Fedora Desktop are also respectful members of GNOME Community like the legendary Matthias Clasen. The second is that Classic Mode is basically just a Default Shell patched with a bunch of extensions, so the differences in practise are pretty small.

So the real question is: “Why RH guys (including some GNOME and Fedora guys) believe that Classic is more appropriate desktop than Default, for the RHEL customers*, when RHEL users are more tech-aware from the casual users of a Fedora or Arch (ok not Arch!) or Ubuntu home-distro?”.

The good news of course is that GNOME 3.8 and GNOME 3 will receive the enormous attention of RHEL and all its derivatives like CentOS and Oracle Linux. Besides RHEL is not only about CLI but is deployed as desktop workstation in various companies -RH doesn’t disclose their clients like Canonical.

*Question: Is a RHEL user considered customer while a Fedora user just user? -If yes, what that means? ;)