GNOME != Fedora [LWN.net]

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 5, 2011 8:44 UTC (Sat) by spongy (guest, #59953)
In reply to: GNOME != Fedora by jmorris42
Parent article: Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

AB-SOLUTELY! "UNDOCUMENTED." That is the main heartburn with my users with Gnome2 & 3. They might be more inclined to LEARN how to configure it if it were more user-friendly (read: documented).

Since Fedora is deeply intertwined with Gnome, we have stopped installing and maintaining it at our shop for the last year or so.

By wasting time, trying or otherwise struggling to make it work for them has led to our admins and helpdesk abandoning support. We continue to work with KDE 3/4 on openSUSE, Ubuntu/Kubuntu and Debian and with CentOS on our server farm. We have stopped supporting those Gnome boxes which some users (mostly developers) insist upon running. They are on their own.

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GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2011 15:37 UTC (Sun) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (3 responses)

Documentation is at http://library.gnome.org/. I think there are 100+ documents on there. Most of that documentation is also delivered with the various applications.

Equalling user friendly to documented? User friendly is much more than that. If some behaviour is totally unexpected, but documented, it doesn't make it user friendly.

Trying/struggling to make it work? I don't get it. I know GNOME doesn't have much support offerings atm (people are working on it), but GNOME is far from alpha level quality. So what do you mean?

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 8, 2011 3:58 UTC (Tue) by sciurus (guest, #58832) [Link] (2 responses)

Where's the documentation on administering GNOME/Fedora components like dbus, dconf, gnome-keyring-daemon, gnome-session, gnome-settings-daemon, gvfs, imsettings, pulseaudio, networkmanager, consolekit, packagekit, udisks, etc?

http://library.gnome.org/admin/ has none of it. http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/15/html/Deploy... briefly touches on a few of them. With enough searching you can find some manuals on freedesktop.org, but nothing that seems well-curated.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 8, 2011 15:32 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Agreed. Finding information on polkit, upower, and udisks[1] has proven quite difficult. In early 2010, there was a single command to tell polkit that users are to use DBus to poke HAL into shutting down the machine. Since upower has taken over, I've had no programmatic way of shutting down my machines as non-root since there's no documentation on what keys polkit needs added to it to do the same thing.

Polkit documentation lists how to grant actions[2] which no longer exists. It allowed listing known actions which made it discoverable. AFAIK, there is nothing to replace that part of it. UPower docs[3] state that polkit controls the return value of org.freedesktop.UPower.SuspendAllowed...but offers nothing about what the 'action' for polkit is or how to change it with a polkit file.

[1]Strictly speaking, autofs is handling things for me rather than udisks and I don't see much reason why it would be better than a "* -fstype=auto,rw,noexec,relatime,nodev :/dev/&" (along with similar lines for fat and ntfs disks to set the uid) line.
[2]http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/PolicyKit/polkit-auth.1.html
[3]http://upower.freedesktop.org/docs/UPower.html [4]
[4]As a side note, gtkdoc's habit of making tooltips *everywhere* on its documentation pages is very distracting.

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 22, 2011 4:33 UTC (Tue) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link]

Don't waste your time.

You can see from the responses by bkor and others affiliated with GNOME that they don't see any problems or issues with GNOME 3+. It's perfect.

If you don't find it perfect, then you are a simple refusenik.