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ClutterClutterPosted Nov 10, 2009 7:55 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165)Parent article: GNOME 3.0 in September 2010 I suppose by 3.0 it will actually be impossible to run Gnome without nautilus getting in the way. As of 2.28, I couldn't install gnome-session without also installing nautilus. (It was never required before.) To turn off nautilus I had to go into gconf-editor and find desktop/gnome/session/required_components_list, and remove "desktopmanager" from the list. To delete nautilus and its exclusive dependencies, I had to hand-edit /var/lib/dpkg/status and remove the dependency, then "dpkg -- purge nautilus", and then "apt-get autoremove" the rest (saving, incidentally, >50M). Some of us never see the desktop, because we have windows open with, you know, work in them. What is a desktop manager supposed to do for us? A special curse is reserved for whoever applied the patch that replaced the in-place documentation for apps/desktop/interface/gtk_key_theme, which used to identify "Emacs" as one of the key theme options, with the meaningless filler "Basename of the default theme used by gtk+".
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Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 8:10 UTC (Tue) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link]
Actually, I believe it's the other way around. The Gnome Shell would do the desktop+panel inline, and nautilus would go into being only the file manager once again.
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 8:16 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
You seem to be saying that I won't be able to have a panel without also having screen background clutter.
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 8:28 UTC (Tue) by mbanck (subscriber, #9035) [Link]
Are you sure a desktop environment is the right thing for you?
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 9:05 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
Gnome-panel is useful. Applets in the panel are useful. Minimizing windows to the panel is useful. Switching between "workspaces" is useful. Consistent menus, filename picker, font rendering, and sound routing are useful. Icons on the screen background are a nuisance.
Desktop icons weren't such a great idea on the Mac, 25 years ago, and they're no better today. Nautilus appears to do about what the Mac Finder did. The Finder fit on a 400K floppy along with the operating system. Nautilus takes up 50M. Does it really do 250 times as much for you?
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 9:16 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
Many nontechnical users can only use the desktop background as a place to store their files. They are unable to cope with file managers or the concept of directories. I've seen it many times.
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 9:31 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
People who can only think visually are welcome to depend on a desktop file manager. It's another thing entirely to force one on everyone as the price for access to the useful parts.
KDE gets in trouble offering every conceivable alternative for every function, which makes it impossible to test it exhaustively. By contrast, allowing bits you don't use to be turned off, or omitted, doesn't create that kind of test-engineering load. Similarly, table-driven features, such as lists of key bindings, don't add test-engineering load, because each variation exercises the same code.
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 11:35 UTC (Tue) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]
Please, if your beef with gnome is that
1) nautilus draws desktop -> turn off /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop. Use gonftool-2 or gconf-editor. 2) if nautilus uses 50MB ram -> Don't read memory usage from top
if you complain about missing possibilities to turn of features with regard to nautilus, see 1) and
And really please, this has nothing to do with gnome-shell. It's only about you.
Documented? Posted Nov 10, 2009 12:52 UTC (Tue) by djao (subscriber, #4263) [Link] In my experience, gconf-editor settings are absolutely atrociously documented, and in fact the special curse in the original posting was addressed specifically towards such an instance of poor documentation.
Documented? Posted Nov 10, 2009 16:25 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
In my experience you are wrong.
In a modern Gnome environment run gconf-editor.
Select 'Apps' --> Nautilus
Click on one of the subfolders. Click on a key value. Notice how there is a
--------------------------
There are few things more hateful and lazy then a developer filling up
Gconf-editor works for me because it provides a logical tree layout of
Documented? Posted Nov 10, 2009 18:06 UTC (Tue) by djao (subscriber, #4263) [Link] Yes, very good.In the original comment, ncm was complaining about exactly such a long description, that you have so eloquently described. The description in question is, and I quote: "Basename of the default theme used by gtk+." You claim "I can't find anything that does not have a decent enough description that I can use to figure out what the keypair does." I challenge you to explain how in the world can anyone tell from this description that the two valid settings for this value are "default" and "Emacs"? The description of this particular gconf option was not always so awful. In previous versions of gnome, the help text specifically mentioned by name that the two possible settings of the option were "default" and "Emacs". Someone actually thought it was a good idea to remove that help text. They say GNOME is open source, and that if you see a problem you should provide a patch, but what possible response is there to this nonsense, when the necessary patch consists merely of reverting to the previous version?
Documented? Posted Nov 10, 2009 19:55 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well seeing how it is certainly possible that you can have many different
key themes it would be impossible for the GTK folks to tell you what the valid entries are. Seeing how that key entry is actually for what it states the description is actually very accurate and not misleading or to short or wrong in any fashion.
The actual problem is not that it does not list valid theme names, which
If Gnome actually had good documentation on what a "Key Theme" is and what
So therefore this same exact problem is going to plague LXDE, XFCE,
Also the problem will plague KDE since I don't can't find any information
Documented? Posted Nov 10, 2009 20:42 UTC (Tue) by djao (subscriber, #4263) [Link] Everything you say is correct, but absolutely none of it is justification for making the documentation any worse than it already was before.What bothers me is not actually the poor documentation. If the documentation was poor and improving, or poor and static, then I could at least understand where things are coming from. But in reality the documentation is poor and getting worse with each revision. That is what I don't understand.
Documented? Posted Nov 11, 2009 15:18 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Well if you think about it it just made the description "more correct".Emacs may or may not be a valid entry depending on whether or not that theme is installed. Also there are other themes names possible. You can have a 'vi' theme, for example. So saying that possible entries are 'Emacs' or 'Default' is actually factually incorrect and misleading. The real problem in the original post, which is a very long running source of anger on lwn torwards gnome, is just the lack of documentation and support for "gtk key themes"; and very specifically Emacs-style keybindings. And yes the lack of documentation is very bad. Documentation is what makes software usable. Shitty software with good documentation is superior to excellent software with shitty documentation. This is a chronic problem with Linux software.
Documented? Posted Nov 11, 2009 17:03 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
We have a homebrewed version-control system at work. It has excellent documentation but does not support branches or directories and takes >30s to check out a single file.
I prefer git, not-very-nice documentation though it may have.
Documented? Posted Nov 11, 2009 17:08 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
Hmm. I consider git to be one of the better documented open source programs, since documentation is extensive and includes numerous examples, often including discussion of what options are for (one of the things I hate is documentation with entries like "--enable-frobnobulator - sets whether or not you want the frobnobulator enabled". Well thanks *so much* for that helpful tip).
Documented? Posted Nov 11, 2009 19:51 UTC (Wed) by djao (subscriber, #4263) [Link] I dispute the characterization that omitting the names of the default and Emacs key themes makes the documentation "more correct". As shipped by the upstream source, the values "default" and "Emacs" are the only possible functional values. You can modify your own private installation to add more key themes, but then again, we're talking about open source software here -- any behavior can be customized. That is no excuse whatsoever to omit mentioning the two originally valid values.Moreover, even if the possibility of local modification is a serious concern, there are far better ways to handle this in the documentation. For example, add a line such as "Depending on local system modifications, other key themes may also be present." I feel, however, that you are still missing my main point. I am not angry at poor documentation in and of itself. What upsets me is the actively hostile attitude of the upstream developers towards improving the documentation. This attitude makes it impossible for the community to contribute positively, short of forking the software. It drains away one of the most important advantages of open source in the first place.
Documented? Posted Nov 11, 2009 20:37 UTC (Wed) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]
You are accusing the gnome developers of being actively hostile to documentation patches. Do you have any sources or examples to back this up?
Documented? Posted Nov 11, 2009 21:47 UTC (Wed) by djao (subscriber, #4263) [Link] Of course, although this thread is getting quite long already. The example is the same example that started this whole thread. The change to reduce the description of the gtk-key-theme option was certainly either introduced or approved by a GNOME developer, and this action is hostile and actively detrimental to improving the documentation.Even if the change is technically "correct" as per the grandparent post (which I do not agree that it is), there are many natural ways to improve correctness without reducing specificity. It takes an actively destructive mindset to apply the fix that was actually applied.
Documented? Posted Nov 12, 2009 2:25 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
I think it is better to assume goodwill and send a documentation patch than complain about perceived hostility.
Documented? Posted Nov 12, 2009 4:04 UTC (Thu) by djao (subscriber, #4263) [Link]
I already raised this issue rhetorically earlier in the thread. What possible patch can anyone send? The necessary code is already in their svn/git repository. Just revert to a previous version.
Documented? Posted Nov 12, 2009 15:09 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
A patch can very well revert a setting and the important part is to initiate a discussion in the GNOME development forums. The key is to assume good will.
Documented? Posted Nov 12, 2009 16:15 UTC (Thu) by djao (subscriber, #4263) [Link] It seems a discussion has already been initiated, at least: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558198As I assumed, there was no movement on the issue. However, if you insist, I will go there and raise the issue more forcefully, in a little while, after I get my work done.
Documented? Posted Nov 11, 2009 10:17 UTC (Wed) by russell (subscriber, #10458) [Link]
why not put gconf-editor in the user's face then. Instead it's a developer tool because they don't want to eat their own dog food.
Documented? Posted Nov 11, 2009 15:11 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
It's just a tool for enabling/disabling features that are rarely used.
It's not a development tool. It's really a administrative tool. You can use
Documented? Posted Nov 13, 2009 4:39 UTC (Fri) by russell (subscriber, #10458) [Link]
I was not very clear what I was meaning.
I don't have a problem with gconf-editor, it's just a tool, rather, it bugs me ( and others ) that the options visible to users are decided by a very narrow view of what people do. If not, the proliferation of options would be huge. That doesn't stop people from wanting to customise, have options, and do things there own way.
One change I would welcome to the way GNOME does things would be to put a visibility flag next to each of the gconf options ( where possible ) to make that customisation available through preferences.
Then we could all satisfy our own use cases without pushing anything on each other.
Documented? Posted Nov 12, 2009 15:04 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
What GNOME provides, all too often, is 'figure out what I consider to be
the best default and provide no visual indication that this is in any way configurable, thus driving away all users who disagree with me'.
Clutter Posted Nov 11, 2009 10:14 UTC (Wed) by russell (subscriber, #10458) [Link]
Yes every setting is documented EXCEPT for the ones that AREN'T !!!
see pulseaudio for example.
The discussion is kinda pointless after blatant lie Posted Nov 11, 2009 23:26 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] By contrast, allowing bits you don't use to be turned off, or omitted, doesn't create that kind of test-engineering load. You are right, in a way: it does not create that kind of test-engineering load. It creates 10 times worse load. You must retest all programs included - huge trouble. And what for? To safe two cents of HDD space? Sorry - if you want this feature, you must implement is yourself...
It is pointless to discuss anything with someone who accuses you of lying. Posted Nov 12, 2009 1:25 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
What it says. Curiously, falsely accusing another party of dishonesty is a favorite tactic of the dishonest to avoid addressing the matter at hand.
Allowing things to be turned off does not, in fact, add to testing load.
It is pointless to discuss anything with someone who accuses you of lying. Posted Nov 12, 2009 15:17 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Yes it does: you have to make sure that the rest of the system works with
all combinations of the deactivateable components deactivated.
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 14:28 UTC (Tue) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]
And there are many technical users who actually use the desktop as it's main folder. Why waste time opening a file manager when a single desktop switch to an empty one will give you access to the files you currently work with?
Off course this only makes sense when you can arrange the icons as you like, grouping them by type or usage, and having folders on the desktop for the others that you don't need so frequently (and remembering their locations, which is one thing KDE 4 seems to still don't get right some times).
And off course this doesn't make sense for the source code of a project.
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 16:39 UTC (Tue) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link] > And off course this doesn't make sense for the source code of a project.This is a good point to make. I don't do everything on the desktop, just a lot. As a general rule, the less technical something is and/or the more I am working on it by myself, the more likely it is to be on the desktop. Important desktop files get moved/archived as appropriate. I have a lot of folders on the desktop. It's not a complete soup of file anarchy.
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 16:28 UTC (Tue) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]
I'd consider myself a technical user and I use the desktop for most of my work files. It lets me see right off what I'm working on, and when the icons take over the screen, that's a hint to clean up. I like physical things out in the open too. When I moved some hand tools at home from cabinets to a pegboard, that was also very useful.
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 10:11 UTC (Tue) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> Icons on the screen background are a nuisance.
Not for me, I never see them :)
> Nautilus appears to do about what the Mac Finder did.
Not quite that much, due to the restrictions of the Linux file system hierarchy. Finder could be/is also used as an application manager. A nice, clean model, which could be understood by non-experts because it kept simple things simple.
I know, package management does a lot that the finder couldn't, but it was still very nice...
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 10:37 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] Nautilus takes up 50M.Sounds you really want to use a different DE. I have been using XFCE instead of KDE for a while now, and find it quite sufficient for the general tasks I expect of a desktop. Some parts of the UI are not as nice as in KDE, but that is offset by a better general responsiveness and a lightning-fast startup compared to KDE. One could argue that a small footprint is essential for a good DE. Its job is after all to facilitate using the real applications, and it must not get into the user's way, which is what it is doing, if the internal operations of the DE start causing any perceptible delays.
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 16:57 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Nautilus takes up 50M.
Actually it sounds like he does not know how to properly gauge memory usage.
My Nautilus has a 76M Virtual Memory reserved. However the amount of memory
So Resident Memory - Shared Memory + X Memory = Actual Memory usage required
It's a big application, but not a huge deal.
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 18:30 UTC (Tue) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]
If you all would have actually read his comment, he says that he is saving 50M of disk space by not having it installed, not RAM by running it.
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 19:35 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well sorry.
But that makes even less sense. Why care how much disk space it uses? 50
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 18:26 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
Have you considered using KDE4?
Clutter Posted Nov 10, 2009 19:48 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
So... don't put icons on your desktop? Ubuntu ships with a completely clean desktop. If your
distro of choice does not, then delete them, and turn off trash and home icons, etc. I don't see any problem here.
Clutter Posted Nov 11, 2009 16:59 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Er... if you never see the screen background because you have windows open all the time with work in them, why do you care what's painted on the background? KDE 3's kicker put useless stuff on the desktop background, too (removable drives, often quite out of sync with the *actual* set of removable drives on that machine), but I didn't give a damn because I never saw them.
(KDE 4, now, has made my desktop useful again. I have an empty virtual desktop specifically so my plasmoids are visible somewhere.)
Clutter Posted Nov 11, 2009 6:15 UTC (Wed) by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576) [Link]
Indeed.
As a gmail user, I am also annoyed I cannot fully remove all of ubuntu's evolution packages. I don't need an email client, no matter how many extras it has in it. I don't need nor want evolution taking over for my system calender. If anything, it should have been abstracted out into an independent library and evolution changed to rely on the library, instead of the bonehead move of "well, let's just depend on evolution, then".
Same with the mono dependencies that tomboy brought in.
For an operating system that essentially embodies 'choice is everything', I find it extremely aggravating that my available choices are waning rapidly from a small number of silly design decisions that could have been avoided.
Most of my ubuntu boxes are administered graphically with freenx. Nautilus and it's network bookmarks make things easy. Many of them are VMs with a specific purpose. Often I just need the basics of gnome and go out of my way to trim down packages I'm not using. Firefox, Nautilus, gnome-panel, system-monitor-applet, system-tray-applet, and gnome-terminal are about all I need.
But the packages are set up for hard dependencies when in many cases a Suggests or Recommends is a better option.
The default package selections are a good middle ground for initial general desktop usage, and I'm not arguing they should be changed, but I justify every byte on my VMs if I can, so I should be able to remove nearly any application or applet package, and then follow up with an autoremove to wipe out the remaining library dependencies.
Hope they realize this stuff before Gnome 3.0 hits.
Clutter Posted Nov 11, 2009 7:02 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
What are you complaining about has nothing to do with GNOME. Evolution can be removed without taking off GNOME. Only e-d-s cannot be removed but despite the name, it is not Evolution specific and is a generic calender store. Mono can be easily removed as well. Fedora Live CD does not even include it by default. The only official Mono program in GNOME is Tomboy which has been replaced by Gnote in the Fedora 12.
Clutter Posted Nov 11, 2009 10:49 UTC (Wed) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
Uh, Ubuntu's gnome packages *don't* depend on tomboy. The "gnome" package does, but that's just a convenience metapackage (read its description), you can remove it if you don't want everything it depends on. Nothing bad will happen. The same seems to be true of evolution, AFAICT.
Clutter Posted Nov 11, 2009 8:05 UTC (Wed) by Janne (guest, #40891) [Link]
"To delete nautilus and its exclusive dependencies, I had to hand-edit /var/lib/dpkg/status and remove the dependency, then "dpkg -- purge nautilus", and then "apt-get autoremove" the rest (saving, incidentally, >50M)."
50M? Yes, I can see that 50M being useful, since todays hard-drives are so small.... 50MB is about 0.01% of 500GB hard-drive!
Seriously, what HARM does Nautilus cause? Yuo mentioned that you find desktop-icons to be useless. Well, remove them, problem solved. I fail to see why you need to remove Nautilus to achieve that. Or do you think that you are now radically more productive when you do not have Nautilus running?
Clutter Posted Nov 11, 2009 10:07 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] Which part of "incidentally" are you having trouble understanding?in·ci·den·tal·lyBut sometimes some of us like to mount flash storage, or a partitioned disk. Sometimes some of us have other uses for the rest of the drive -- for, you know, work. Likewise, some of us use small machines, netbooks, not overwhelmingly overburdened with RAM. Sometimes they don't have swap. Every megabyte consumed to run a useless program interferes with running something else that is useful. But that's not really the point. Providing software that some people use is good. Building in unnecessary dependencies on what many of us find to be useless software is rude, and amounts to bad engineering.
Clutter Posted Nov 11, 2009 12:59 UTC (Wed) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
> But sometimes some of us like to mount flash storage, or a partitioned disk. Sometimes
some of us have other uses for the rest of the drive -- for, you know, work.
Now you are just engaging in meaningless hand-waving. It's getting hard to find an SD card or
Turn off the desktop icons which you have such an unhealthy hatred for and go on. Disk space
Emacs! Posted Nov 12, 2009 2:18 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] Some people find Emacs useful. The disk storage needed for a complete and full-featured copy of Emacs is cheap, and the RAM is getting cheaper all the time. (If your every machine doesn't have 4G of RAM yet, why don't they?)Therefore, every Gnome program should depend on Emacs. Every Gnome desktop should run Emacs at startup, and re-start Emacs whenever it's shut down. Anyone who doesn't want Emacs can use gconf-editor to make Gnome start it up minimized. How could anybody complain about that? We can make the same argument for every program in the repository. Evolution: who doesn't check their e-mail when they log in? Firefox: many people spend all their time in a browser, it should be ready as soon as possible, and it should be re-started automatically because it crashes a lot.
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