Questions for deployments of GNOME [LWN.net]

Questions for deployments of GNOME

Posted Jun 12, 2006 15:03 UTC (Mon) by kelvin (guest, #6694)
In reply to: Questions for deployments of GNOME by nix
Parent article: Questions for deployments of GNOME

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.

to post comments

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.)