Questions for deployments of GNOME [LWN.net]

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 0:19 UTC (Mon) by xtifr (guest, #143)
In reply to: Questions for deployments of GNOME by nix
Parent article: Questions for deployments of GNOME

I tried KDE first, and still prefer GNOME (though I don't use either one as my main desktop). I know several people who have tried both and chosen GNOME for its cleaner, less cluttered interface. I also know several who have chosen KDE for its simpler, more up-front tweakability. But most people I know have simply stuck with whichever one they encountered first (or whichever one happens to be the default on whichever system they're using now).

Inflexible? You obviously have not looked at GNOME very closely. I find the number of options--the amount of flexibility--to be truly mindboggling! Of course, they made a deliberate decision to not clutter the basic interface with a million options, but that does not mean that they removed the options--far from it. Granted, you may have to read a little more documentation to take advantage of some of GNOME's more advanced options, but I wouldn't think your average LWN subscriber was scared of documentation.

The system I normally use instead of either GNOME or KDE has no visible options whatsoever. All configuration is done with a text editor. And my own setup is HIGHLY tweaked and configured. Would you describe this as inflexible? And if not, then how can you possibly say that GNOME is inflexible?

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Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 11:12 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Well, how should I put it. Many GNOME options are available only from something which appears to have been designed by looking at the Windows registry editor and removing what vestiges of usability remained in it. We have all the joys of limited documentation, no way to associate options with each other, no way to add comments, no sensible way to synchronize options between machines without messing around with gconf-backend stuff...

... as I see it, we have all the disadvantages of non-GUIs, and all the disadvantages of GUIs, and damn few advantages.

gconf is a nice idea, but the way it's been *used*, *shudder*. No, a centralized configuration system is *not* an excuse to push all the user-interface part of that configuration into a single app that does no part of its job very well (an app that is, note, *not accessible* from the user interfaces of the programs it configures).