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GNOME and the way forwardGNOME and the way forwardPosted Aug 18, 2005 15:16 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137)Parent article: GNOME and the way forward > Where, exactly, is the little option to get emacs key bindings? I'll like to know what happened to the option to change window managers. Back in 1999 all one had to do to change window managers in Gnome was select an alternate from a list. Now it's 2005, and we have to open a terminal window and type something like:
This assumes that the user has already visited Computer -> Desktop Preferences -> Sessions -> Current Session and changed the metacity session from Restart => Normal so that metacity doesn't beat sawfish to the punch and restart before sawfish loads. That's not really progress.
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GNOME and the way forward Posted Aug 18, 2005 16:30 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] Any desktop environment is not about choice.. it is about usability for a new user. KDE makes decisions for you, GNOME makes decisions for you, AfterStep makes decisions for you... if you dont agree with those decisions there are lots of other people who may have written something that you will agree with. And you can always get someone (or spend the time yourself) to package it up for you in that way.
I have seen these arguments going on for 17+ years... how FVWM dumbed down TWM.. and how the keybindings in FVWM were superior than TWM. And then there were guys who argued that the X system was a hack of stuff they had done with ASCII in the 70's ..
GNOME and the way forward Posted Aug 18, 2005 16:45 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] >Any desktop environment is not about choice.. it is about usability for anew user.Is this an agreed upon definition, or did you just make this up? I think the matter is still open for debate, and probably always will be.
GNOME and the way forward Posted Aug 18, 2005 16:58 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Any desktop environment is not about choice.. it is about usability for a new user GNOME and KDE are approaching duopoly status, to the point where it's becoming increasingly difficult to do useful work without running at least some GNOME or KDE applications. If this forces us to lose the ability to make choices about our desktop, then we might as well abandon this silly Free Software enterprise and all use Windows.
GNOME and the way forward Posted Aug 18, 2005 18:04 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] > [It's] becoming increasingly difficult to do useful work without running at least some GNOME or KDE applications.
Maybe that should tell you something about how much the people doing the actual work hate dealing with the non-GNOME/KDE (meaning obsolete standards, X10, unbounded configuration options, arbitrary requests to shell out to external programs -- none of which are really "Unix", IMO) way of doing things. There's not some group of developers sitting on piles of time and money going "Let's see what features we can rip from the hands of the peasants today!" There's people with limited time and resources who, largely, are writing the kind of applications they want to use themselves, and companies with limited time and resources who are writing the kind of applications people will buy.
> If this forces us to lose the ability to make choices...
You have the same option you've always had: Write your own applications, the way you want them. Are you going to deny GNOME developers the same just because they write more applications than you?
Whatever happened to "rough consensus and working code"? That's the Unix way. Write (and maintain) the code, show that there's a large enough user group to care, and if they still don't listen fork -- if you're right, you win. But empirical evidence (GoneME) would suggest that's not the case.
GNOME and the way forward Posted Aug 18, 2005 18:30 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Maybe that should tell you something about how much the people doing the actual work hate dealing with the non-GNOME/KDE (meaning obsolete standards, X10, unbounded configuration options, arbitrary requests to shell out to external programs No, it merely saddens me to see that the ubiquity of Microsoft has forced even free-software UI developers to bend over backwards to accomodate Microsoft's stale and irritating UI concepts. You have the same option you've always had: Write your own applications If I had a nickel for every time a Gnome supporter told me that, I'd be quite well off. That's the attitude I despise. Sure, Free Software authors write software to scratch their own itch. But if they ignore feature requests that are easy to implement (heck, if they ignore patches implementing such features), then they're no better than proprietary vendors who ignore customer requests. Free Software is about a social contract, not just about technology, and if Gnome developers display the same arrogance as Microsoft, then what's the point?
GNOME and the way forward Posted Aug 18, 2005 20:15 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] > No, it merely saddens me to see that the ubiquity of Microsoft has forced even free-software UI developers to bend over backwards to accomodate Microsoft's stale and irritating UI concepts.
I hear this but I don't believe it; if it was true, I'd find Windows a lot easier to use after using GNOME for the past few years. It definitely borrows more from OS X than Windows, and more from ICCCM/X history than OS X.
> But if they ignore feature requests that are easy to implement (heck, if they ignore patches implementing such features)
100 easy features makes for a complicated program; no patch is without maintenance costs.
> [They're] no better than proprietary vendors who ignore customer requests.
Any software project -- free software or proprietary -- that routinely ignores significant portions of its user group will fail, or a new project to support that group pops up. That's almost tautological, since if the feature doesn't appear, it wasn't that significant in the first place.
> Free Software is about a social contract
The GPL and BSD license, as well as the FSD, OSD, and DFSG, make no promises or even expectations that the application will do exactly what you want. In fact the disclaimer of warranty explicitly says otherwise.
Put your code where your mouth is. Dozens if not hundreds of people continue to do it every day -- which is why software like Window Maker, AfterStep, FVWM, and XFce survive, and projects like GoneME fail.
GNOME and the way forward Posted Aug 18, 2005 20:30 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] No, nevermind my other post, I want to take more issue with this nonsense:
> [It] merely saddens me to see that the ubiquity of Microsoft has forced even free-software UI developers to bend over backwards to accomodate Microsoft's stale and irritating UI concepts.
Do you honestly believe the GTK developers are thinking "Boy, I'd love to implement X, Y, and Z, but because MS doesn't, I guess we can't"? Do they have a secret project with 300 options and a million revolution features they're keeping hidden from you? You're postulating a vast conspiracy by the GNOME developers to kill the Unix way, whatever that might mean to you. That's bullshit.
They write software they want; I write software I want; you can write software you want. When the kind of software we want converges, we can share it. That, and nothing more, is free software.
GNOME and the way forward Posted Aug 19, 2005 2:17 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] > Do you honestly believe the GTK developers are thinking "Boy, I'd love to implement X, Y, and Z, but because MS doesn't, I guess we can't"?
No.
I honestly believe the Gnome developers believe they can get Windows users to use Gnome if Gnome becomes sufficiently similar to Windows. How else can you explain abominations like GConf, or the one-and-only UNIX MUA that lacks external editor support?
There's no good reason for a lot of the decisions they've made, other than to davka[*] reject the UNIX way.
[*] This Hebrew word is practically untranslatable, but the essence means to do something simply to be obstinate.
GNOME and the way forward Posted Aug 26, 2005 15:52 UTC (Fri) by mightyduck (guest, #23760) [Link] > Do you honestly believe the GTK developers are thinking "Boy, I'd love> to implement X, Y, and Z, but because MS doesn't, I guess we can't"? Do > they have a secret project with 300 options and a million revolution > features they're keeping hidden from you? You're postulating a vast > conspiracy by the GNOME developers to kill the Unix way, whatever that > might mean to you. That's bullshit. No it's not bullshit. Let's get a little reality check here. Gnome is backed by big corporations like Sun, HP, IBM(?) and they give a sh*t about old UNIX users. They're goal is to pry loose Windows users and convert them to their systems. THAT'S why Gnome is more and more following the WindBlows way of things. The one who pays the musicians determines which music is to be played!
GNOME and the way forward Posted Aug 19, 2005 7:44 UTC (Fri) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] Any desktop environment is not about choice.. it is about usability for a new user. Most people don't switch desktops frequently. So why design a desktop environment for the few that are switching? That's like making all your keyboards in alphabetical order; sure, it's lousy for typing, and it screws everyone who's already typed a lot, but it's great for the new user.
GNOME and the way forward Posted Aug 18, 2005 17:03 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] Try the following GConf key:
Key name: /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/current
Mind you, I don't know exactly how changing this key will interact with gnome-session's desire to restart Metacity, because I've never tried it.
GNOME and the way forward Posted Aug 18, 2005 19:28 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] And *this* is why noboy uses GConf. :)
GNOME and the way forward Posted Aug 18, 2005 19:36 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Still, you have to admire how faithfully they've re-invented the Windows registry.
GNOME and the way forward Posted Aug 18, 2005 17:42 UTC (Thu) by newren (subscriber, #5160) [Link] The gconf key /desktop/gnome-applications/window_manager/default may come in handy for you. You could also try gnome-session-remove, or editing /usr/share/gnome/default.session or /usr/share/gnome/default.wm or /usr/bin/gnome-wm.
Note also that the same issue occurs trying to run a development version of metacity, for which metacity has the --replace option in order to try to replace the current WM (so I can just run "./src/metacity --replace"). Other WMs probably have a similar option, which would probably be easier than the above; I believe being able to replace another WM is part of the EWMH freedesktop.org spec, though, and I don't know if sawfish supports that or not.
GNOME and the way forward Posted Aug 19, 2005 1:58 UTC (Fri) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link] The way you change window managers is:
fvwm2 -replace
Replace "fvwm2 -replace" with the equivalent for your WM of choice.
You can also just run any WM in .Xclients prior to launching Metacity (or other WM), and the second-launched WM should silently exit and leave the first one in charge. Basically WMs have a protocol to see if another one is running and to replace another one only if requested.
The way you posted is a gross hack to work around a version of Sawfish without a -replace mode, but most WMs have -replace (and if they don't, that's where the bug lies).
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