gnome-tweak-tool [LWN.net]

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 10, 2012 4:21 UTC (Sat) by ncm (guest, #165)
In reply to: gnome-tweak-tool by david.a.wheeler
Parent article: GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Yes, when combined with a wide assortment of "extensions", gnome-tweak-tool can make Gnome 3 almost tolerable. People with little experience or limited needs probably wouldn't notice anything wrong.

Gnome is openly aiming at people who don't use their computer for much, like those making cars for people who don't drive, kitchens for people who don't cook, boats for people who don't sail, and books for people who don't read. There are many more of those people than of the rest, and collectively they have lots more money. The problem is that when you make the perfect system for them, they won't find it, because they can't be bothered to look. If they do happen across it, they won't tell anybody, because they won't notice.

to post comments

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 10, 2012 4:52 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (15 responses)

I dunno. I write chunks of the kernel under Gnome 3. It's hard to believe that I'm not using my computer much in the process.

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 10, 2012 6:26 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (14 responses)

Sssh. Don't tell him that people actually do real work while using Gnome 3 and let him keep his delusions. It's probably a comfortable notion for him, like a favorite blanket.

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 10, 2012 6:41 UTC (Sat) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (5 responses)

I suggest you set yourself up a remote link, for instance, and try again. And please, no 100 Mb/s or gigabit stuff that most people cannot afford or have no access to.

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 11, 2012 11:52 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (4 responses)

Um, why would he remote the entire desktop? Why wouldn't he just use his local environment instead?

I fail to understand this obsession with remoting entire desktops when you can fire up any application you want, remotely, and just use that.

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 11, 2012 13:21 UTC (Sun) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

Because there is no alternative when you are working remotely over the Internet. X11 is *unusable* unless you have an Internet connection so good that it is indistinguishable from a LAN connection.

xpra disclaimer: I've tried it, it doesn't work *for me*, probably because the version I'm trying is a bit too old. I am encouraged that its success demonstrates that Wayland will drastically improve remote working on Linux systems.

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 11, 2012 22:14 UTC (Sun) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't know, maybe because someone's job is on another continent and tunnelling X is impossible? Maybe because in the real world, companies run different environments than what you may set up for yourself?

Your suggestion is a bit like that of late Steve Jobs during the antenna problems with iPhone 4 - just don't hold it that way. Really?

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 12, 2012 3:02 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

Perhaps what I'm trying to say is "use (or make) appropriate tools for the task at hand."

Of course, in the real world, what actually happens is that old systems are never replaced, only stacked upon, which is why my local auto parts store have POS terminals running fancy web-based UI running on an in-store server which just translates everything into a console/textual terminal session, which in turn tunnels over IP (instead to replace dedicated POTS phone lines) to a decades-old inventory-management application running on an emulator running on an IBM mainframe (which itself may be emulated...)

And of course, the source code to all of those intermediate components is long gone, so no changes could be made even if they were willing to risk breaking the whole stack to improve the efficiency of even one component.

Fortunately, the Free Software Movement is braver than that. Which is how we have the likes of KDE4, Gnome3. And KDE3, Gnome2/MATE/Cinnamon, and XFCE, Enlightenment, and many, many others.

We control the entire stack by virtue of having full source code to everything, and the rights to change it however we like. It's downright stupid to cripple our primary advantage by treating any part of that stack as a sacred cow that can't be slaughtered.

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 12, 2012 13:03 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

That's actually possible for people to implement. This suggestion is more like a workaround Microsoft suggested when it was discovered that beginning any line in an email with the string "begin " caused Outlook to consider everything from that line forward a uuencoded attachment, even if it wasn't: ask your correspondents to use synonyms for the word "begin", e.g. "start".

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 10, 2012 18:42 UTC (Sat) by deepfire (guest, #26138) [Link] (7 responses)

I suggest you get yourself a Radeon X800, which is perfectly capable of running Doom 3, but reduces to complete unusability with Gnome 3, once you hit 6-7 workspaces on a 1920x1200 monitor.

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 11, 2012 12:04 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (5 responses)

Oh, you mean Doom 3, an eight-year-old game that was designed around the capabilities of the original XBox, with graphics hardware a full two generations older than your X800?

And the X800, also eight years old, is a full *seven* generations old now, and the last two (or three?) generations of even integrated Intel graphics is both more powerful and more capable.

Modern Linux Desktop Environments actually use the capabilities of semi-modern graphics hardware.

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 11, 2012 22:21 UTC (Sun) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (4 responses)

There is nothing wrong with running optimally on modern graphics hardware. The problem is that when non-modern graphics hardware or software rendering (a VM for instance) is used, Gnome 3 obsession with 3D gets in the way and makes the system unusable. And to do what? Animate overview?

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 12, 2012 2:46 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

In the real world, you have to make choices. A, B, and/or (maybe) C. Each has its set of costs, each has its set of benefits.

Only in la-la land (and Debian) is the answer "don't decide, and just go with all of the above."

"Running optimally" on modern graphics hardware means that you still have to support obsolete graphics hardware, which means your entire decision/design tree has to incorporate that. It's double to triple the initial amount of design/coding work, and exponentially increases the support cost, and does not gain them anything significant on their strategic long-term goals of building a kick-ass *desktop* environment.

They decided to focus their effort into building a single opengl-driven path. For a fallback for completely obsolete hardware, a pure software opengl rasterizer would be used, keeping the complexity at the natural component boundaries, rather than have to have the entire stack aware of everything else. It's sound software engineering practice.

We're at the same situation with desktop 3D as we were in the earlier days of Linux-wireless, before there was solid internal infrastructure and enough common code to make things consistent. Each driver had its quirks, so all applications had to know about those quirks to ensure consistent end-user behaviour.

NetworkManager was a major disruption, because its maintainer took it upon himself to actually fix the underlying buggy drivers so they all behaved in a consistent manner. This is where the Gnome3 folks are at now; a great deal of work is going on behind the scenes to drag the 3D stack kicking and screaming into the modern era.

This means prioritizing development effort -- fix the backend bugs, and everyone benefits in the end, rather than work around the backend bugs, and do three times as much work each time something new comes along.

(and as an aside, modern hardware doesn't even have any sort of 2D engine beyond a dumb framebuffer any more; do we "emulate" the old 2D stuff via the 3D engine, or target the future, and make everything 3D which vastly reduces the overall amount of work necessary?)

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 12, 2012 9:50 UTC (Mon) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

And if there was no activities overview, opengl software rendering would be good enough for most stuff, even on a remote VM.

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 12, 2012 13:08 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

(and as an aside, modern hardware doesn't even have any sort of 2D engine beyond a dumb framebuffer any more; do we "emulate" the old 2D stuff via the 3D engine, or target the future, and make everything 3D which vastly reduces the overall amount of work necessary?)

I've been hearing that text-mode support and/or 2D support will vanish entirely from video hardware for ages, indeed this was why the framebuffer code was added to the Linux kernel in the first place -- some non-x86 platforms (e.g. famously Sun workstations) didn't have a VGA text mode and used a software framebuffer for everything (and with Sun workstations we learnt why that framebuffer should not be implemented in interpreted Forth).

But if you do that on x86, you break the BIOS. So video cards on x86 keep dragging around at least VGA text mode (and probably the whole panoply of even more ancient CGA/EGA/Hercules-compatible text modes and a bunch of VESA modes too).

Now you'd think EFI BIOS would give a chance to fix this -- only my new machine's EFI BIOS boots up in VGA text mode! So it doesn't look to me like VGA text mode is disappearing any time soon, and i fthat's not vanishing I suspect the 2D layer is sticking around too, even if in emulation, even if as merely a dumb framebuffer.

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 12, 2012 17:59 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> I've been hearing that text-mode support and/or 2D support will vanish entirely from video hardware for ages,

Any part of the '2D acceleration hardware' has been gone for a while now. At least from modern hardware. Any sort of acceleration support based on 2D hardware is done through emulation, if it exists at all.

VGA mode and such things are more related to modesetting which is a bit orthogonal to that issue.

Modesetting issues were one of the biggest, if not the biggest, reasons to keep the old driver framework inherited from XFree86. Without modesetting support you couldn't really display anything useful on the display, especially if your display isn't one of the 'standard' resolutions and support for that resolution wasn't programmed into the BIOS (a typical issue on old pre-GMA Intel IGP laptops)

Now that mode setting has moved to the kernel rather then in the XServer having the Xserver direct access to hardware or their own special drivers is more of a detriment then anything else. Hopefully Wayland turns into a usable solution for running X applications on Linux since it will simplify the driver situation quite a bit.

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 12, 2012 17:44 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> I suggest you get yourself a Radeon X800, which is perfectly capable of running Doom 3, but reduces to complete unusability with Gnome 3, once you hit 6-7 workspaces on a 1920x1200 monitor.

I use one of those low-end AMD Fusion laptop. One of those were the CPU and GPU are integrated together. Gnome 3 runs as well on that system as any desktop, thank-you-very-much.