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.
It consists of the following components:
- GnomePanel
- Metacity
- GnomeApplets
The first release was on 2013-09-25, included in gnome-panel 3.8.0.
This is the first release that ships a session descriptor and wrapper script for the "Gnome Flashback" session.
This is similar to the standalone fallback session previously shipped in Debian / Ubuntu.
As integration with the rest of the Gnome stack has suffered somewhat, this is mainly aimed at distributions
that still want to support a metacity / gnome-panel based desktop (e.g. for LTSP installations).
Some integration work may be necessary - for example, nautilus 3.8 no longer draws the desktop background icons.
Brian