gnome-tweak-tool [LWN.net]

gnome-tweak-tool

Posted Nov 11, 2012 11:52 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: gnome-tweak-tool by bojan
Parent article: GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

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.

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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".