LWN.net Logo

Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users

Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users

Posted Nov 12, 2012 14:22 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users by cortana
Parent article: Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users

Yes, but not all image types can be opened in, say, eog (no SVG, no PDF, no PS). And so on. Not to mention that some *.pdf are documents, others images. This looks conceptually simple, in practice it is anything but. And depends on lots of other packages.

Could it be better? Absolutely. But ranting on LWN about it won't get it fixed (and breaks LWN).


(Log in to post comments)

Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users

Posted Nov 13, 2012 15:27 UTC (Tue) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link]

Doesn't break LWN! LWN is about Linux; Gnome 3 is a big part of Linux; I won't use Gnome 3 until I can do what I want; I have asked and asked around more about how to do this particular thing, and now, after I took off all my Gnome 3 testing environments out of frustration, almost 5 months after I started putting out feelers about this problem, I find a possible solution in an obscure corner of an LWN thread.

Maybe someone can answer me this: If there is a "feature" in Gnome 3 that is making my life miserable, and I would like to report that to someone who will listen and act, what's the easiest way to do it?

Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users

Posted Nov 13, 2012 19:32 UTC (Tue) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]

The answer is right in front of own very eyes yet choose to look elsewhere.

Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users

Posted Nov 14, 2012 0:08 UTC (Wed) by jirka (guest, #83100) [Link]

Lazy answer: Don't use GNOME 3. Actually that worked wonders for me. I am far less (though still somewhat) frustrated with XFCE.

Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users

Posted Nov 13, 2012 19:15 UTC (Tue) by jirka (guest, #83100) [Link]

But this was done correctly previously if I remember right (but was removed long time ago). Anyway, firefox handles it well (and netscape has handled it correctly as far back as I remember), and even xfce which is very thin on features does this correctly though only in the newest version. How to do it correctly? Make it possible to see a list of known types where you can pick what opens what. This is not a matter of coding, it is a matter of design. It's not that nobody did this feature, it is not there on purpose.

Of course I know ranting on LWN makes no difference. But I don't feel bad. I have spent several years working on GNOME. In that study in 2010 I was still in the top 20 contributors to GNOME by commits or something like that, even though I stopped contributing around 2004 or so. Some of early UI design decisions in GNOME were mine. Some of these decisions were bad, some good. Anyway, I don't feel like I haven't put in my time to fix issues. So I've earned the right to be grumpy and tell people what they've done is crap, and rant wherever I please. People can rant (and they have) about my software before.

Copyright © 2013, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds