Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 30, 2011 18:23 UTC (Sat) by Tet (guest, #5433)
In reply to: Quotes of the week by daniels
Parent article: Quotes of the week

I also continue to posit that LWN commenters are a phenomenally poor representation of the average computer user.

Perhaps. Should that be relevant? Personally, I couldn't give a shit about the average computer user. I want something that works for me. And frankly, GNOME 3 isn't it (nor was GNOME 2, FWIW). Despite that, I actually quite like the idea, and in a few years, maybe it will be usable. For now, though, if the defaults work for you then great. If they don't, you're screwed, because there's no way to change anything. I remain concerned that the people behind such an influential desktop environment seem to have explicitly decided to only cater to non-technical people. Sure, they outnumber us. But that doesn't mean those of us with a clue should be ignored.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 31, 2011 21:47 UTC (Sun) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (2 responses)

Despite that, I actually quite like the idea, and in a few years, maybe it will be usable. For now, though, if the defaults work for you then great. If they don't, you're screwed, because there's no way to change anything.

if you're not the "average computer user" then that's not strictly true.

there's a tweak tool that exposes in a sensible GUI the knobs for tweaking the UI, and there's a fairly powerful extension mechanism that allows you to: add new UI elements; change the window management policies; and even monkey-patch the internals. pretty soon there'll even be a website to submit, distribute and control the extensions. so if you are not the average computer users, you can literally go insane with the custom modifications.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jul 31, 2011 23:00 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Does "going insane" with modifications include a fully-featured tiled window manager mode, never steal focus policies, or a mouseless desktop? Not adversarial, just curious what is conceivably possible with the hooks extensions can use.

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 4, 2011 6:11 UTC (Thu) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link]

Does "going insane" with modifications include a fully-featured tiled window manager mode,

for obvious different mileage of "fully featured": http://gfxmonk.net/shellshape/

never steal focus policies,

focus stealing prevention is a pretty nasty piece of code inside mutter, so this is probably going to be really hard to delegate to an extension.

or a mouseless desktop?

you can add your own key navigation code: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-July/msg00015.html - but the goal is to have key navigation by default.