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Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktopsCinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktopsPosted Jan 12, 2012 16:50 UTC (Thu) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846)In reply to: Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops by dgm Parent article: Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops
> How many of those things make sense in retrospect? About half. Gnome did end up dropping spatial nautilus, switching to a single-window control center, adopting a policy clarifying the difference between Name and GenericName in .desktop files, deprecating bonobo and libgnome and moving their functionality to gtk+, putting together a UI design team after concluding that leaving design decisions up to individual C coders results in ugly applications, and transitioning from gecko to khtml-derived webkit for html rendering (but sticking with mozilla's mozjs/spidermonkey as the main javascript vm). On the other hand, users got used to the new default button order and inconsistency issues were quickly solved at the toolkit level; today, gnome is a heavy user of non-C languages like python, vala, and javascript, and most people agree that it's a good thing; instead of esound, gnome now depends on the even heavier and more controversial pulseaudio; gconf was replaced with the even more registry-like gsettings (using binary files for the default storage backend); and gnome's insidious influence reaches ever further up and down the desktop linux stack, and although this meets with some grumbling, there is realistically no alternative if one wants to be competitive with proprietary operating systems on the desktop. And of course, Akcaagac's proposal to use PDF—slow-to-render, paginated, optimized for printing on dead trees—as the default documentation format was, quite bluntly, insane.
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Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops Posted Jan 12, 2012 18:00 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] And of course, Akcaagac's proposal to use PDF—slow-to-render, paginated, optimized for printing on dead trees—as the default documentation format was, quite bluntly, insane.I won't touch the rest of your comment, but I have to say that in my experience PDF works better than other formats currently available for documentation. Pagination is an advantage, or at worst does no harm. Being able to print from it is also an advantage, although a rarely-used one. The only downside I see is that it's a derived format. You still have to maintain the original source for the documentation in some other format.
Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops Posted Jan 12, 2012 19:06 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
the big disadvantage of pdf is that you can't reflow the text to match your screen/font size.
having documentation on an e-reader (kindle/nook) can be a great thing, if your documentation is only in pdf, this is a problem
Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops Posted Jan 13, 2012 14:16 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Also, there are readers for e-book formats for desktop Linux as well. (They probably require ripping out of Calibre by the roots, though.)
e-book formats are not ideal, but they're a lot better for reading text than PDF ever was. The *readers* are not ideal, but just because the Kindle doesn't do Tex-style autohyphenation (or break on hyphens at all) doesn't mean that a desktop e-book reader cannot.
Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops Posted Jan 14, 2012 19:46 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Try FBReader - it works great on mobile phones/readers and it does autohyphenation (based on locale settings).
Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops Posted Jan 12, 2012 18:08 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> instead of esound, gnome now depends on the even heavier and more controversial pulseaudio;
Which actually works well, sounds nice, makes configuring Linux audio very easy, and is actually very useful. All of which Esound utterly failed at for the most part.
Also it's very configurable on how 'heavy' you want it to be.
> gconf was replaced with the even more registry-like gsettings (using binary files for the default storage backend)
Which is also has very few dependencies making it much more useful for non-Gnome applications to use. Thus providing the facilities for application developers to create unified configuration backends that can allow unified configuration interfaces (for possibly storing group policies in LDAP, for example.. or making scripting configuration changes for many different applications much easier). It's also much faster, safer to use, and makes it easier for application developers to 'do the right things'.
:)
Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops Posted Jan 16, 2012 15:26 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] users got used to the new default button orderWell, not this user... I did loose some work because some **** put the OK button to the right, to the time honored position of Cancel.
Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops Posted Jan 19, 2012 13:47 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>Well, not this user... I did loose some work because some **** put the OK button to the right, to the time honored position of Cancel
I still periodically lose data because Firefox on Linux assumes the Gnome button order and has no option to switch to a sane setting.
The real bitch is that it's the right way round on Windows, plus it's the only Gnome application I ever use, so I can never learn to get used to the reversed button order.
The switch was just so *senseless*. Why change the defaults that almost everyone is used to, just to conform with some other minority platform? Plus, everyone knows that boolean questions are answered with 'yes or no', not 'no or yes' :P.
Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops Posted Jan 20, 2012 4:25 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
Aside from teh "other minority platform" being a more popular _desktop_ platform, the change still makes sense, and I'm still annoyed that other DE's like Windows don't use it by default.
The logic is very simple and based on UI research. The inconsistency is certainly worse than whatever improvements the button order has, of course. That's a bug in Firefox or your other applications, and not GNOME's fault.
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