I particularly like that RMS quote [LWN.net]

I particularly like that RMS quote

Posted Jan 1, 2016 20:21 UTC (Fri) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
In reply to: I particularly like that RMS quote by bronson
Parent article: Quotes of the week

I really don't agree with boudewijn's accusatory tone, however:

> Then Gnome 3 and KDE 4 arrived. They wasted huge amounts of my time and forced me to switch my team to Macs just to get back to work.

I guess I just don't understand this. As I mentioned above-thread I've been using UNIX (lots of different variants) since the 1980's and I started with Linux in 1993 (lots of different distributions). I don't see anything about Gnome 3 which would justify the anger you have.

Certainly the difference between Gnome 2 and OSX is *far* greater than the difference between Gnome 2 and Gnome 3. My current employer only provides a macbook and I used OSX for a while: it drives me absolutely nuts: I really hate it. I now dual-boot Linux and try to avoid rebooting into OSX as much as possible.

I did skip the first few Gnome 3 versions (I think I jumped from Gnome2 to something like Gnome 3.6 or so): maybe the early versions were problematic and things have gotten better? Maybe the type of work you do causes the DE to impact you more than me?

I make the following customizations: change capslock to CTRL, enable focus-follows-mouse mode, install two extensions: Frippery panel favorites and system-monitor (to put CPU etc. graphs on the panel), and make a change to force the title bars to be smaller. Of these only the last one requires any "magic" to implement, and it's an issue with the default theme, not the Gnome3 implementation.

There is only one single thing about Gnome3 that really bugs me, and that's the decision to force password entry as a modal dialog: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688434 It's fine if it's your login password being requested, and possibly even SSH passphrases, but email account passwords, network passwords, etc. MUST allow you to go look them up somewhere then cut and paste them. This is being "fixed" by apps changing to not use the Gnome3 password dialog, which is not great either.

> But I do care, and I'm trying to describe the problem as best as I can.

Well, honestly, "a bunch of buggy, poorly thought out barely-working environments" cannot be considered a useful (or, from my experience, accurate) description by any stretch :).

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I particularly like that RMS quote

Posted Jan 4, 2016 20:58 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

> Certainly the difference between Gnome 2 and OSX is *far* greater than the difference between Gnome 2 and Gnome 3

That makes sense but it wasn't my experience. Once we got used to Homebrew (bleah), it was a disturbingly easy switch. The Mac and Gnome 2 feel pretty similar, especially to a worker that doesn't care much about the platform they're using (IME).

I started with 3.0 (forced upgrade because we needed the latest Ubuntu), commented on a bunch of bug reports, and finally gave up around 3.2 or 3.3. If Mate had been available when Gnome 3 shipped, things might have gone a lot smoother.

> Well, honestly, "a bunch of buggy, poorly thought out barely-working environments" cannot be considered a useful (or, from my experience, accurate) description by any stretch :).

That's true, oversimplified to uselessness. I'm just trying to find a quick way to describe my issues with KDE 4 (especially Nepomuk) and Gnome 3.low. I'll find a less accusatory and grim way of conveying that thought, thanks!

Hm, your desktop prefs sound very similar to mine.

I particularly like that RMS quote

Posted Jan 7, 2016 5:42 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

> Once we got used to Homebrew (bleah), it was a disturbingly easy switch. The Mac and Gnome 2 feel pretty similar, especially to a worker that doesn't care much about the platform they're using [...]

It now occurs to me that copying a competitor's UI isn't a blunder in itself. It's getting everyone used to that design, then following up by burning as many bridges as humanly possible while your competitor *is still offering* the same user experience you've got your users hooked on...

Maybe this partly explains why the “glowing Apple sea” phenomenon in FOSS conferences.