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Gnome 2.0 RC2 Asks For Abuse
A nameless reader submits: "The GNOME Desktop 2.0 release candidate 2 has been released! Gnome 2.0 should be coming out soon! The release notes have some good information."
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I don't think you have to wait for Gnome 3.0 for this stuff to be fixed. The improvements between 1.0 and 1.4.x were amazing and I would expect the same kind of thing here.
Also, it'll take a while for most applications to be ported over to Gnome 2.0. In that respect I think a lot of users might be disappointed since most of what people think of as "Gnome" is really applications. The release of Gnome 2.0 means the new API and a few basic tools are ready, but the real benefits won't be apparent until Gnumeric, Evolution, and other big apps are ported over.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I agree that dumbing down is bad, but I don't agree with your WM point. Why should every GUI program writer write the same support code? You might as well say that they have to make all their apps stateful by hand. It's much simpler to provide one provably correct code path in the WM, than potentially thousands in all the applications in a system.
For those apps which are "special," they could simply send a "NON_STATEFUL" token to the WM when dealing with that window.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
All the apps I use regularly, Galeon, Nautilus, gnome-terminal etc.. does remember window size.
GNOME 2.0 has tried to decrease the amount of options. This is a Good Thing [tm], because it means that the options that are still there are useful, easy to find and intuitive.
Metacity is NOT the default WM for GNOME 2.0, it is just an option. It will probably be the default WM some day, but it is still not completely ready for that.
Swallowing other applets than GNOME-applets is hardly useful for anyone but a very few. It was a great source of bugs, and nobody really wanted to fix it. It was decided that unless someone really wanted it badly enough to fix it, then it would be dropped. Nobody wanted it badly enough.
The strange thing is that the people that scream about lack of options, are mostly the same that scream about bloat. This is ironic because the huge amount of options it would take to satisfy everyone would lead to an extremely bloated interface both UI-wise, bugwise and probably also memory-wise.
If someone wants an option or a feature this is the way to do it:
- Open up a bug report in bugzilla, and argue carefully for your feature or option request.
There are three issues that need to be addressed before they are accepted:
The swallowed applet was probably ok for point 1, a little on the edge for point 2, and definitely a miss for point 3. If someone does care enough to code, then state your interest on desktop-devel-list@gnome.org, and it might be in GNOME 2.2 or something like that.
That's because of the debian developers that handles the KDE packages and the debian developers that handle the GNOME packages. It's not some kind of conspiration. The KDE-people have probably worked hard with trying to get KDE 2.2 packages good enough for Woody. The GNOME developers have made other priorities.