Clutter [LWN.net]

Clutter

Posted Nov 11, 2009 8:05 UTC (Wed) by Janne (guest, #40891)
In reply to: Clutter by ncm
Parent article: GNOME 3.0 in September 2010

"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?

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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·ly
adv.
1. As a minor or subordinate matter: by profession a lawyer and incidentally a musician.
2. Apart from the main subject; parenthetically.

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. 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
USB flash storage with less than 2GB capacity. The cheapest on Amazon is $10.59, and that's
for a 4GB drive. So 50M represents about 1% of the smallest flash media that is makes any
sense at all to buy. And that works out to about 13 cents worth of storage. Of course, Amazon
has a 1500GB rotating drive for $129.00. So 50M would represent about 0.003% of that drive.
But then... you say you might partition it. How many partitions were you thinking of? Maybe a
thousand? At any rate, it works out to 0.4 cents of storage.

Turn off the desktop icons which you have such an unhealthy hatred for and go on. Disk space
is a total nonissue in this case, not even deserving the "incidental" and "parenthetical"
mention that you were so careful to give it in your original post.

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.