Questions for deployments of GNOME [LWN.net]

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 11:29 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Questions for deployments of GNOME by xtifr
Parent article: Questions for deployments of GNOME

Not all of us are ranting and cursing. Some of us are honestly curious about what draws people to one environment over the other.

I mean, it's obvious that both have userbases, and that those userbases don't intersect much: the question is why, and to what extent each environment can be rendered attractive for the other without ruining it for its existing userbase.

GNOME probably has a lot of detractors because it swung from a featureful GNOME 1.4 to a GNOME 2 with all the features removed. I at least stuck with GNOME 1.4 for *ages*, then made the big leap to KDE. There's a certain sense that the GNOME devs have decided they don't give a damn about a large part of their userbase, and some of the devs' own comments have tended to reinforce that. It's a pretty natural human thing to dislike being told that you will be ignored. (Even though of course the GNOME devs had no requirement to pay any attention, I at least consider it a point of honour when supporting software I wrote to try to keep *all* my users happy inasmuch as they don't have conflicting requirements, and not ignoring them is part of that.)

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Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 12:57 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (9 responses)

"I at least consider it a point of honour when supporting software I wrote to try to keep *all* my users happy inasmuch as they don't have conflicting requirements, and not ignoring them is part of that."
The problem with keeping *all* the users happy is that then you'll need to support a million features, a lot of which is useful to a few percent, and just an annoyance to everybody else. Perfect way to get to clutterhell.

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 13:28 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (8 responses)

A search facility to search the config dialogs seems like a good idea.

(IIRC KDE has just that, but I'm not in X right now and I can't remember.)

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 14:30 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (7 responses)

You really see this as a good thing? Clutter from featuritis, solved with more clutter?

There really is a problem when you need to SEARCH for the dialogs...

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 17:12 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

Question: which is better, me cursing the system daily because I can't work out how to make it behave in an intuitive fashion, or the clutter caused by featuritis?

As an example, I grew up with systems where Ctrl-U was delete line, and Ctrl-W was delete word. I expect these shortcuts to work, and made the effort to configure the KDE desktop I use day-in, day-out to match my way of thinking. On GNOME, I can't find a way to make Ctrl-W anything other than Close Window; this may be a case of not enough looking, but I'm not prepared to unlearn the habits of 15 years learning, just because someone, somewhere feels that I shouldn't have them.

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 20:24 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (1 responses)

Use emacs keybindings, no problem.

(Yes, some applications have Ctrl-w hardwired to "Close window", that's a bug, but hardly GNOME's fault).

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 22:47 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Even applications like, oh, gnumeric (a flagship GNOME application).

As far as I can tell, menu shortcut keys take precedence over the (fantastically arcane to set up) gtk-emacs-* bindings in every situation (although I haven't yet checked the Gtk source to verify this).

As such, you have to unbind all clashing keybindings in *every application separately* before things work as you expect.

(Oh, and those vaunted Emacs keybindings? You know how many keys they bind? Fifteen. That's pathetic, just pathetic: even readline beats that by a factor of two or three. Not even paragraph moving is implemented.)

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 17:39 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

By this definition, you'd slim down Wikipedia to a dozen pages or so. It's too large and cluttered to find anything in, you know, and search dialogs, well, they're 'clutter'.

I mean, sure, kcontrol is cluttered in the sense that there are an awful lot of settings in there (of course there are: the whole point of it is that *everything* that's configurable in KDE should be configurable from that place if necessary, and thanks to KParts this is done without adding bloat to anything) --- but because there's a search option, that clutter *is not annoying*. You can browse if you want, or jump straight to an option: both are possible.

Computers are good at looking for things. Why not let them?

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 20:08 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (2 responses)

Ok, comparing an encyclopedia with a desktop is just too far out...

The purpose of Wikipedia is to retrieve information, of course you want to be able to search that information.

The purpose of a control panel is to configure stuff. If a search box is needed for that, then something is wrong, at least in my mind.

Search for:[How to change pixelsize of that bar that I NEED to be 3 pixels wide, find it now, or I will not be able to WORK!]

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 22:49 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Simply searching for `bar' or `pixel' would be a good start.

And since it's an isearch-style search box (well, sort of like isearch mixed with M-x occur), you often don't even need to type in the whole word.

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 15, 2006 15:31 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

"Ok, comparing an encyclopedia with a desktop is just too far out..."

Why? Both seek to be comprehensive, target themselves at all users, and are the first point of interface to their respective fields. Seems wholly appropriate to me.

Search isn't just for finding needles in haystacks; it's also for being able to focus on what you want rather than looking through everything, and for being sure you haven't missed an occurrence of what you're looking for. That's useful whether you have ten lines or ten thousand pages to look through.

On a broader point - why should my interactions with my computer be bounded by the limitations of your imagination?

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 15:03 UTC (Mon) by kelvin (guest, #6694) [Link] (3 responses)

GNOME probably has a lot of detractors because it swung from a featureful GNOME 1.4 to a GNOME 2 with all the features removed.

This has been repeated to death by now, but I've yet to hear an explanation of what 1.4-features that are missing. Please, I'd really like to know. Is it the ability to set the tile background on panel launchers? Is it the lack of "viewports" in Metacity (even though "workspaces" (or whatever they're called) have the exact same functionality). For all I know, the removed settings were simply work-arounds for behaviour that was broken in the first place.

The only legitimate regression that I've heard about is that emacs key-bindings are non-functional. This is clearly a bug. Is it a serious bug? No. Do any of the developers use this? Apparently not, or it would have been resolved by now. Have patches been written? I have no idea.

Second of all: GNOME 2.0 was released four years ago... get. over. it.

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 17:45 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

The features that annoyed me most that were zapped (concentrating on the panel and other 'GNOME workspace' stuff here: some of the apps, like gnumeric, aren't half bad):

- a myriad tiny options, including 90% of the panel configuration: I hate the standard look of panels, and that was all I now had access to. (In KDE, for instance, I have three differently-sized panels in different locations, two autohidden, with background colours indicating function).

- the ability to remember the location of dragged menus and toolbars vanished (reported as a bug, marked WONTFIX, gee, thanks). Of course you can't do the dragging now without messing around with semi-undocumented options in gconf-editor.

- the session manager moved from being bad at coping with X apps on remote machines to being completely incapable of it. Sure, KDE is little better (I had to read the source to figure out how to do it), but I'd need to rewrite a fairly large chunk of gnome-session before it will work in GNOME, as far as I can tell.

- viewports and workspaces are distinct: viewports are views into a larger space, so you can have things positioned half-on-half-off different screens. My working style absolutely relies on such things, and has since the early 90s: why should GNOME force me to change decade-old habits because they can't be bothered to keep features that *fvwm 1* could handle easily?

... and much else I can't recall.

Roger Leigh has had trenchant comments on the API wreck that is glib, gtk, and the GNOME libraries in the past: search uk.comp.os.linux and you'll find them.

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 19:55 UTC (Mon) by philips (guest, #937) [Link] (1 responses)

My favourite were shortcuts. 1.4 had a system where I could put a shortcut at any action. 2.x just cut it out. And highly customizable panels.

I spend long time trying to understand what went wrong with my shiny new GNOME 2.4(? - it was RedHat 8). I think I reinstalled at least once and tried to repair gnome installation several time. then tried to compile from sources and of course that failed. then went to forums just to find Havoc with new official line he just got from corporate HQ.

It was then Havoc was claiming that *nobody* want to configure desktop, everybory wants desktop preconfigured with proper settings. He is just from meeting with higher-ups - sorry, that's why the WONTFIXes were applied that late. The higher-ups gave him new results of new selected users poll. And he already knows the one true settings for everybody and all configurability would be eventually cut out since it's not needed anymore.

That's why I'm against giving GNOME any poll results. It's just hard to guess what would happen to GNOME 3.x then. And I think GNOME 2.x users have to be much more concerned of the poll consequence.

At last I have to thanks RedHat and GNOME for forcing me to switch to SUSE and KDE with IceWM. IceWM is just way too cool.

P.S.

"We are the nobodies,
Wanna be somebodies,
We're dead, we know just who we are" (c) Marilyn Manson.

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 23:01 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The shortcut behaviour is still available: you say

gtk-can-change-accels=1

in your ~/.gtkrc-2.0.

(This is documented nowhere that Google can find. "true" doesn't work, nor does "1". I found it in the Gtk source tree, in gtkmenu.c. There is, of course, no gnome control-center option to configure it, although gtk-qt provides a KDE control panel applet.

How terribly user-friendly.)