tags
comments: 0I installed a release candidate for gnome tonight. First, a short history.
Gnome 2.2 comes out, and many of the kinks and polish meant for 2.0 finaly come to fruition with the new release. Long disgusted with KDE's bloat, but finding it difficult to manage in other more minimalist environments, I decide to ditch KDE 3.x and go full time with Gnome 2.2. I'm happy for a good while; so happy for such a good while, that I compile 2.4-pre from source the night it comes out and subsequently love that too. But, the longer you stick with something, the more annoying its flaws become.
Seiken Densetsu 3 is a great game, probably one of the greatest RPG's ever made, and definitely in the top tier of SNES games. Its graphics have no real competition in the era, and its breadth and epic are only challenged by Chrono Trigger. But allowing myself to be critical of it, I can see that the square programmers really are no match for Nasir: Seiken Densetsu 2 (as far as I know, the last game to start up with "Programmed by Nasir") had a much, much cleaner combat system with gameplay that was far more responsive. Using any item or spell in SD3 causes battle to stop, and they never ironed out the 3 player which means that 1 player always gets controlled by an artificial intelligence that has no "Do not attack you fucking idiot" option.
Similarly, one can draw a parallel to gnome, especially now that I've been using that other desktop environment for what I cannot believe is soon to be 2 months now. Lets go through a few gripes that I have with the new release.
Filebrowsing in gnome was always sub-par to Windows and KDE; but being a solid gnome user for 8 months straight gets you pretty used to dropping into the terminal to do most of these things; and I really have no problem with that. But, after using Konqueror for filebrowsing and organizing for a while, I've gotten used to a graphical agent that is actually sane, and actually tunable. Instead of solving issues with Nautilus (bugzilla bug #1: its slow and shitty) and stripping features from it that were un-necessary, the Gnome team decided to give it Windows95-esque default behavior and then claim that its some great new thing in useability called "spatial browsing". What this means is that Nautilus has no input bar for manually inputting folders, no toolbar for actions like "up" or "back" (and the lack of an "up" did not stop these geniuses from filtering out the ".." folder), and no visible way to change the configuration so that you're not trapped in an idiotic world where traversing 4 folders to get to a file opens 5 windows.
On the plus side, the new Nautilus has a "--no-desktop" option, so that it doesn't fuck with people if they wanted to share the insanity from another desktop environment. I'm not sure if it always had this, but it should definitely run like this by default. It also sports a "--browser" option, which for me just opens itself up in a classic looking nautilus interface, then shuts itself down and opens the directory again in the new interface. Burried within Gconf is a key that allows you to always use the browser interface, which means that the browser window will pop up, close itself, then pop itself up again ad infinitum. Fun!
Also burried within Gconf was the key to change Metacity's default double-click-on-title-bar behavior from maximize/restore to window-shade. I had to dig through Gconf for it because I didn't realize that the "Windows" option in the "Desktop Settings" folder on the "Applications" menu would do it for me, partially because it had been called "Metacity Preferences" or "Metacity Setup" in the past, partially because I was looking in "Advanced", and partially because that option did not have a working icon so my eyes pretty much skipped over it. Trying to edit the key in Gconf to give me window shade (Gconf is set up very much like the windows registry) resulted in changing a keyval (a text entry) into a checkbox (a Boolean value); so my double click action would result in "true" or "false". w00t.
This meant that not only did double clicking on any title bar froze my window manager for 5 seconds, but using the "Window" configuration dialog did not work because it detected a bad key and disabled the option. I finaly fixed this by resetting that Gconf key back to its default value and then changing the permissions on the Gconf editor to 000.
But lets get away from that problem so that I can complain about Nautilus some more. One of the most important things for a WM to have (for me) is the scroll wheel scrolls the desktops option for users using multiple desktops. This gives the user a near infinite space to change workspaces, and a quick method in which to do it. KDE's pager, which has its own problems which we'll get to in a minute, also allows you to mousewheel on the pager itself to change desktops. Nautilus, which controls gnome's desktop, has no such option, making the Gnome desktop pager almost completely useless compared to that of Fluxbox or KDE.
The pager itself; the actual panel applet, does provide some improvements on KDE's. The first major improvement, which really should be a braindead feature, is that it allows you to click on and move windows from desktop to desktop visually from within the pager. This is nice for big windows you want to go away, but still want readily accessible by your scroll wheel. Oh, well, maybe not readily accessible. It's not too much of a pain to move programs around with it; considerably less stupid than KDE's system which requires you to execute a second pager that is not dockable in its panel system. However, any click raises the window that you clicked on to get raised. This behavior must be destroyed, as it causes my desktop switches to always pull the largest windows over everything else on that desktop. A single click on a desktop should leave it unchanged; when the click is held and the position is changed, then it can/should pull the window on top and start to drag it.
With no sane filebrowsing or desktop paging, I'm pretty much left with a useless albeit extremely gorgeous environment. I was excited to try out the Gnome VNC viewer, but when I clicked "connect", it would printf "button_connect1_clicked" to the console, which means they threw it together quickly in Glade and didn't even get close to finishing it yet. I managed to find out that if I expanded the screen to include useful preferences (like a password input, which was necessary), then the connect button actually tried to connect; but it failed, because I think it simply ignored the password I supplied it in the password field.
Back to bashing nautilus; it keeps icons close enough together on the desktop that text from one will go on top of text on an adjacent icon.
The overall speed has not been significantly improved, although there are some bits of better response here and there. Gimp 2.0 is nice, although its release doesn't really coincide with 2.6. The speed of the run dialog is such that I always type the first character before it pops up, rendering commands rather useless; but it does feature $PATH completion, although KDE's history is probably a better idea with less professional execution.
Summing up, KDE 3.2 floored me with what seemed like (and probably was) hundreds of thousands of man hours directed precisely at where they needed to be directed: simplifying options, tying together features on the desktop, providing interfaces to fringe applications that give it a feel of completeness (kgpg for instance). Gnome 2.6 seems little different from 2.4; the main "improvements" being the rape of Nautilus and the new filechooser (which is quite an improvement over the old utterly un-useable garbage, but not perfect) which is a GTK improvement and not a Gnome one. Gnome 2.4 was the release of the HiG, and Gnome 2.6 is the release of the WtF?.