Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 4, 2011 18:17 UTC (Thu) by Zizzle (guest, #67739)
In reply to: Quotes of the week by ebassi
Parent article: Quotes of the week

> as for how many people use Gnome 3: only one major distribution has been shipping with Gnome 3

I lived through GNOME 1 -> 2 transition.

I don't think I will make it through the 2 -> 3 transition.

This time around the GNOME project has made it's clear that people like me are not part of the desired user base and functionality important to me is no where near a priority. Fair enough, it's their choice.

On the next round of distro updates, the big two, which I have used for a long time, are now pushing completely new and less functional desktop shells.

I'll be looking for a new distro with a shell that offers functionality comparable to the now dead GNOME 2.

My point is that waiting for major distros to ship GNOME 3 may not increase the userbase that much - it's bad enough to cause users to flee to other distros.

It'll be interested to see how many other users take the same approach.

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Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 5, 2011 3:50 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

> I'll be looking for a new distro with a shell that offers functionality comparable to the now dead GNOME 2.

I promised not to get involved in GNOME 3 discussions on LWN again, so I'll simply say this: given your stated preferences, you may find XFCE to your liking.

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 5, 2011 20:20 UTC (Fri) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]

While I personally like XFCE (Xubuntu setup) as desktop, one should note that it also has some maturity issues still. For example there's the issue with disappearing panels or panel items:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/XubuntuPanels

And the apps aren't as full featured / as Gnome or KDE ones, which eventually forced me to move to another desktop, at least until XFCE matures more.

As most desktops allow changing the window manager, I eventually ended up selecting my desktop based on the apps that I use most: terminal, mail and photo manager [1]. Bad experiences on other desktops with less used apps like CD/DVD burning affected this also.

So, I don't quite understand why people select desktop based on its window manager, or complain about one. They should complain if the desktop doesn't work with their favorite standards-compliant replacement window manager...

[1] Browser is of course one of the most used apps, but neither Firefox nor Chrome is tied to any desktop environment.