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Stirring The GNOME Fires

Posted by Hemos on from the battles-rage-on dept.

uninet writes "Tim Butler and Ed Hurst have discussed GNOME quite a bit. Tim likes the current trend, and Ed doesn't. Read Ed's alternate perspective at OfB.biz."

2 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. Re:quote: by DAldredge · · Score: 0, Troll

    No.

    They are evil.

    Nothing good can come of them.

    Also, apple isn't a reliable company to buy computers from as they are having supply problems getting chips for their systems.

    Also, Greenpeace is nothing more than a front to bring in donations, they don't give a shit about the environment, if they did they would not go around the world is a fossil fuel power boat.

    And I thing that abortion is wrong, that john kerry and george bush are almost clones of each other.

  2. Fundamentals folks by dbIII · · Score: 0, Troll
    Apparently now gconf is now usable without having to read the source code of gconftool to work out how to change entries of keys (no man page of course - it would be too boring to write one), but two fundamantal assumptions (other than the MS windows registry is cool and should be emulated) have been carried into gnome by developers that came into gnome from the MSWindows diection - that the system is single user, and that the system is not on a network. These assumptions would have been a bad choice even in the 1980's, and the consequence is that it is a major task to port the gconf configuration from one system and user to another, and that things get weird when you run gpanel on a different machine across the network.

    Gnome is unfortunately still a political beast - it has been decided what the one true gnome desktop is, and that's the one you get - no themes for you. I suggest divorcing the GUI configuration from the code and allowing the creation of themes, but have a default theme that is always accessable and easy to switch to. That way we'll get a variety of people working on user interfaces that don't know C or whatever soapy .net VM that gnome will progress towards.

    By themes, I mean real changes to UI behaviour, making the screen behave like an IRIX box or whatever instead of just changing the shade of blue.

    The things that make it look really bad, like gnome crashing again and now the user can't get back into X without the root password because gnome has messed up some permissions are being slowly dealy with - but the UI has been changing at high speed at the same time, because that is more trendy than stability or reading some basic X documentation ( has been used by plenty of people to get out of X for a very long time, but use it with most versions of gdm and you can't get back into X again without root intervention). I don't know how many times a gnome related problem has caused a user to say to me "this linux is supposed to be stable isn't it? Why has my sceen locked up?"