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GNOME and KDE Devs Wrangle Over 'System Settings' Name

An anonymous reader writes "The developer of the KDE System Settings application has launched a formal complaint against GNOME for renaming 'Control Center' to 'System Settings' in GNOME 3.0. This developer is demanding that GNOME immediately change the name of their control panel area. Developers on both sides are now discussing this act."

17 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. This is ridiculous! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Seems both KDE and Gnome are making themselves irrelevant. Switched to XFCE, not going back.

    1. Re:This is ridiculous! by JamesP · · Score: 4, Interesting

      [2]

      No, really, this is ridiculous

      KDE for breaking and rebuilding everything, while making it half-assed.
      Gnome for dumbing-things down excessively (we may call it 'retarding-it-down')

      Switched to XFCE. Next computer is going to be from that company from Cupertino

      This whole kind of idiocy is why we can't have nice things...

      --
      how long until /. fixes commenting on Chrome?
    2. Re:This is ridiculous! by Joce640k · · Score: 3, Funny

      No, really, this is ridiculous

      They're just following the Microsoft model of renaming/moving everything just when you get to know where things are and what they're called.

      Microsoft spends millions of $$$ a year on usability studies so it must be the correct thing to do.

      --
      No sig today...
    3. Re:This is ridiculous! by bhcompy · · Score: 5, Funny

      There's that word again; "lighter". Why are things so much lighter in the future? Is there a problem with the earth's gravitational pull?

    4. Re:This is ridiculous! by Osgeld · · Score: 3, Interesting

      go get a early pentium4 with 512 megs of ram, run gnome and then run xfce (try your best to not infect it with too many gnome libs) you will see what lighter means instantly

      on a much more extreme example take my powermac 9600/300. yea its slow but perfectly usable in xfce, in fact I had to use it for a couple weeks when my main desktop took a dump, uses half of its 256 megs of memory and suits its needs as both a daily electronics bench machine and retro computer (its 14 years old). I installed *something* that installed and started a gnome process and it doubled the boot time and left me with like 3% free memory, then failed to load the application.

    5. Re:This is ridiculous! by mcgrew · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's the politically correct term for "not so damned fat and bloated", although "leaner" might be more PC.

      I thought it was silly too until I rtfa. KDE is right, it will cause problems for folks using both.

    6. Re:This is ridiculous! by thsths · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I have to say that XFCE is getting mighty fat recently - it is no fun on an old PC or even in a virtual machine. Which means that I am moving on to LXDE - it does just what I want, and it does it quickly.

      Is there a law that says software has to get fat over time? Because that is surely the way it is going. KDE 1.0 was pretty light at some point, and up to KDE 3 it worked well in a virtual machine. I guess I could always use trinity instead - but then again I really like okular over kpdf...

    7. Re:This is ridiculous! by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Insightful

      When you get to the phase where your new features all involve renaming things, rounding corners, or improving "user experience" then you know it's done and you should pick a new project to work on.

      I'm sort of serious here. Early on in a project there are lots of important changes and each release has some big improvements. Later on though the devs/company wants to keep up having recent releases so they start reaching deep in the barrel to find things to keep the feature list full.

  2. Re:Really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    RTFA. The real issue is that duplicating the name is causing system conflicts for those with both installed.

  3. Let me get it right. by drolli · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The problem seems to be that duplicate names for different entries in menus on common distributions seem not be be correctly handled and the fix for this is not to go the consistent way (the same things are named in the same way) and fix the functions which create the menus (like detecting duplicate entries and attaching an indication of the package name in the entry), but to plainly forbid to name entries in the same way?

    I dont like that. This is not the year of the linux desktop.

  4. Two menu items with the same name by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you have two menu items with the same name, how do you decide which to choose? The short-term solution being proposed in the thread is to rename the "System Settings" of whatever desktop is not in use: call GNOME's app "GNOME System Settings" when in a KDE desktop.

    1. Re:Two menu items with the same name by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Informative

      That is precisely how they decided to solve it, to everyone's satisfaction. Nothing to see here anymore, move along.

  5. Re:That is a ridiculous complaint ... by SomeKDEUser · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes. Basically, GNOME apps have some of their setting only st-able in the GNOME control panel. Same for KDE.

    Now, despite what some people would have you believe, it is normal, usual, reasonable to have apps from both environment running under whitchever one you prefer. And you may still want to change their settings.

    But now, it turns out that in your menu, you have two completely different system settings, named "system settings". This is clearly not very nice.

    So ideally, they ought to be called GNOME SS and KDE SS, except for two details.
      - KDE named their "system settings" first, and the GNOME dev knew about that
      - KDE decided that "KDE" means the community, not the DE. And clearly, the app configures the DE...
    To me, this is a case of KDE lacking a bit of forsight, and GNOME being their usual arrofant selves (we are an OS -- no you're not, you are a DE, and that is quite enough)

  6. Re:seems to be about a name clash by SomeKDEUser · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Uhh, I also comes from a long background of GNOME ignoring KDE, and acting as though they exist in a vaccuum. Also, they knew about the naming issue.

    So the guy has reasons to be miffed: GNOME, at this stage lives in a bizzare delusion that they are an OS, and not just a DE. And this attitude is clearly grating: they seem to believe that what they do is the standard, and that probably KDE is something like windowsblind is (was?) for MS windows. And of course, the KDE dev have stopped assuming good faith, because their is none.

  7. Re:Yeah... by rubycodez · · Score: 4, Funny

    Quit using two bloated desktops that jumped the shark and have roadmaps leading to buggy piles of shit as milestones, and your problems are solved.

  8. Re:"control panel" by erroneus · · Score: 3, Funny

    Agreed. It should be Kontrol Kpanel. They really love putting K in front of everything as it is... or have they finally gotten over that?

  9. Creating something great requires two people by zooblethorpe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    When you get to the phase where your new features all involve renaming things, rounding corners, or improving "user experience" then you know it's done and you should pick a new project to work on.

    My wife spent some time in serious art-school mode. One of the profs that she greatly respected told her that making great art requires two people -- 1) the person capable of making the piece, and 2) someone else to shoot the first person when they're done. This is because most folks can't leave well enough alone and keep futzing until what was great (or at least on the cusp of it) is munged beyond the pale.

    It does indeed look like at least some of the Linux DEs are at the "shoot the artist" stage.

    Cheers,

    --
    "What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
    "A four-foot prune."