Consort Desktop Environment fork of GNOME Classic announced

SolusOS 2 Alpha 7 is planned to include Consort
Source: SolusOS The developers of the SolusOS Linux distribution have announced the Consort Desktop Environment. This user interface for Linux systems is based on code from the same components that currently provide GNOME 3's fallback mode, also known as GNOME Classic. This mode works without 3D acceleration and provides a desktop which resembles that of GNOME 2; however, the associated code will be removed in GNOME 3.8 – among the reasons given is that nobody has maintained the code base and that the interface appears to have undergone very little testing in recent times.

The Debian-based SolusOS has so far used GNOME 2; with Consort, the project plans to create a similar user interface that is based on more modern components and is, therefore, more compatible with current GNOME applications. This is what differentiates the user interface from the MATE fork of GNOME 2, which continues to use ageing components such as GTK2.

The Consort developers mention that they previously made major changes to some of the components that are used for GNOME Classic, and that this justifies creating the fork. The fork changes the GNOME Panel software that provides the menu bars into Consort Panel; the Metacity window manager is now called Consortium, and GNOME-Session-Fallback, which controls the launch of the user interface, has become Consort-Session. Athena is the planned file manager for the environment – just like Nemo, it is a Nautilus 3.4 fork that was created last summer. Consort is planned to be included in the Alpha 7 of SolusOS 2.

(fab)