Do the actually not like their users?
Do the actually not like their users?
Posted Apr 23, 2008 17:25 UTC (Wed) by alvherre (subscriber, #18730)In reply to: Do the actually not like their users? by pr1268
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor encounters the Hardy Heron
Agreed. I'm a long-time GNOME user and while I'm happy with many of the improvements in every release, it seems the developers find ways to annoy everyone all the time. I have no need for Nautilus at all. In fact I'm not too worried about having to use gconf-editor or whatever to change the appareance of my desktop; but the fact that not running Nautilus means that I get *no background image at all* is disturbing. Regarding blinking cursors, I am not worried, given that the switch from gnome-terminal to xterm is the first thing I do when setting up my desktop. Oops, I just noticed that I get a blinking cursor on Epiphany for editing this comment ... yikes.
Posted Apr 23, 2008 20:34 UTC (Wed)
by alankila (guest, #47141)
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Posted May 7, 2008 17:04 UTC (Wed)
by celtic_hackr (guest, #47391)
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Do the actually not like their users?
My prolonged exposure to GNOME has resulted in apathy: I don't care about the desktop settings
anymore. I guess it's inevitable. To caricaturize: if I like a setting, it's almost certainly
gone in the next release, so there's no point to set oneself for disappointment.
That being said, while I can no longer easily configure myself a nonblinking cursor, at least
I can still put text as white on black. When this option is gone, too, I guess my frustration
level will finally reach its all-time peak, and I will dream of murderous rampages in GNOME
HQ.
The single best thing to have happened to GNOME lately is compiz. I don't talk about the
bling, although I somewhat appreciate that as well, especially whole-desktop zoom. What I am
talking about is the ability to drag windows from one desktop to another again. Every day that
I have been allowed to keep using this feature, I have dutifully sacrificed a chicken and gone
to bed as a happier man.
Is there nothing that can convince GNOME guys to stop removing settings? Would someone at
least write a GNOME advanced GUI that will have all the settings the devs choose to remove? I
think it'd be a hit!
Do the actually not like their users?
I have watched the text edit mode setting for emacs key bindings gradually fade away. First
the dialog-box checkbox disappeared. Then the on-line documentation on the setting in gconf
was deleted! The first could be attributed to streamlining. The second smacks of malice.
When emacs edit key binding ultimately goes away, as it seems it must, I suppose I will
finally switch to KDE. I wonder if there will be anything to miss, then.
Do they actually not like their users?
By the way, the gconf key required appears to be
desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme
and the value that still works to fix the key assignments is "Emacs".
Do they actually not like their users?
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I thought this was lost.
Do they actually not like their users?
Through Gtk themeing you can actually set Gtk text widgets to use any key
theme (RC file) you like:
http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/2.12/GtkSettings.html#...
The above mentioned setting just tells it to use a pre-installed Emacs
keybindings theme RC file from here:
/usr/share/themes/Emacs/gtk-2.0-key/gtkrc
If you look at it, it should be fairly obvious how to create your own
keyboard themes.
Do the actually not like their users?
> I guess it's inevitable. To caricaturize: if I like a setting, it's almost certainly gone in
the next release, so there's no point to set oneself for disappointment.
For me, it happened only one time during the switch from Gnome 1.4 to Gnome 2.0. After an
initial shock and an understanding that it's really going to be this way from that point, I've
*so* switched to KDE :) Don't like being tortured this way. They should have renamed the
project to something different, really.
Do the actually not like their users?
> Would someone at least write a GNOME advanced GUI that will have all the
> settings the devs choose to remove?
That's called gconf-editor. Yes, really -- see above explanation of how to change the settings
for blinking cursor (if you don't use normal configuration in System menu that is). It is not
that hard.
Do they actually not like their users?
So, Gnome's answer for removing obvious features is to go to gconf-editor, but this doesn't
appear to be in the menu, so one would have to dig to find this, just so they can set the
desktop background? And while on this rant, who would ever look for desktop settings in a file
manager, and why would you make the file manager the system settings manager? Isn't that the
job for a system settings manager and not a file manager? I run Linux Mint, so it's a Ubuntu
clone (on steriods). I use KDE, simply because everything is just too hard to do in Gnome, for
my taste. When I want to change something, I want to be able to do it intuitively, not by
having to google for it. Life is complicated enough without having to make it more so. GUIs
should be painless and made for the simpleminded. Not that KDE is all that, there are
certainly things that are hard to do in KDE, but it's far superior to Gnome. I even opened a
Gnome desktop to test changing the background. There was a way to do it from a right click on
the desktop (since I didn't disable Nautilus), but something running in the background made
the window come up so slowly, and every other tab (fonts, animation, etc) in the configuration
screen refused to open. Gnome is a real dog on this <1 year old laptop, but to be fair it was
the third X session running, but when I switch it to KDE it runs fine. I see comments in here
about disabling things in Gnome to get the speed performance back.
Sorry, that's the wrong approach.
It seems Gnome has taken all the bad ideas from Windows and implemented them, only making them
worse. Of course, our Grumpy editor has made his life harder by his own action, which any
normal person would have probably thought was innocuous. Who'd a thunk it? Remove a file
manager and remove your desktop!? I'll bet adding back Nautilus won't easily fix those
problems though, and probably the only way to properly fix removing Nautilus is to re-install
the OS? Wow, just like Windows. Great job, Gnome guys!!!
So my advice to you Grumpy Editor is switch to KDE, it's not perfect but I like it.