We actually asked for feedback to distributions various times. We would've made a decision earlier but e.g. OpenBSD would have problems. Also this time there has NOT been any official announcement yet. What we do is mostly in the open, so things are announced beforehand.
Now, with fallback I thought it should be announced in the 3.6 release notes that we were thinking about it. Unfortunately it was taken out, you can still see what I wrote in the git module though.
For distributions, the suggestion is llvmpipe, though that is terrible. What we are more after is better drivers, with llvmpipe as a workaround.
One thing that is overlooked is that not only gnome-shell relies on good drivers. Various applications have started relying on this as well. So the value of fallback mode was already decreasing.
Gnome 2 didn't need any driver to work, it was perfectly fine with a frame-buffer.
You know what else do not need any driver to work? Windows.
Llvmpipe DO NOT WORK except in latest-generation, very expensive hardware. You are alienating a huge portion of your users, it's specially painful because they are the poor-ones.
The background of this is that fallback mode did not work very well. Various applications have been requiring the same hardware support.
Obviously at the moment this will cause pain. But I don't understand why there is not more anger towards the sorry state of graphics drivers on Linux. My GPU of 6-7+ years old support GNOME 3 fine. At that time I bought a silent GPU, it was NOT the quickest GPU. Why are we accepting that we have such poor drivers?
The anger should be focussed towards the drivers, not something which tries to use 7+ old technology.
I'm sure you know Gnome ran on a lot of things that are not Linux. BSDs for example. The implementation of gnome-fallback in OpenBSD works beautifully. I have a small ARM board that consumes about 1 watt, and you could install gnome on it and you couldn't tell it from my ubuntu desktop, it was that good.
I expect games to need driver support, not a simple DE. If you take in account that not even OS-X need a graphic card to work, you know you are doing it wrong by requiring one. (Don't start with llvm-pipe, I dont need the DE consuming 100% of the CPU)
Now, with fallback I thought it should be announced in the 3.6 release notes that we were thinking about it. Unfortunately it was taken out, you can still see what I wrote in the git module though.
For distributions, the suggestion is llvmpipe, though that is terrible. What we are more after is better drivers, with llvmpipe as a workaround.
One thing that is overlooked is that not only gnome-shell relies on good drivers. Various applications have started relying on this as well. So the value of fallback mode was already decreasing.