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List:       gentoo-desktop
Subject:    [gentoo-desktop] Re: [gentoo-user] Gnome 2 Configurability
From:       Magnus Therning <magnus.therning () wanadoo ! nl>
Date:       2002-06-29 6:03:52
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On Fri, Jun 28, 2002 at 08:47:28AM +0200, Spider wrote:
> okay, I've read a lot of posts about people who whine when they aren't
> presented with mile after mile of checkboxes for different things as
> they enter Gnome 2. Okay, I realize that a lot of you are used to
> being forced to reconfigure every aspect of your system in order to
> get it to work. 

Well, old habits die hard... What can I say? I too was disappointed at
first when seeing that the number of tweakable things in the gnome2
environment seems to have been reduced significantly. I am still not
convinced it was the *best* way to take, but it was *a* way to take, and
it's generally better to make up one's mind than to try to keep all
doors open and try to please everyone... you'll often end up pleasing no
one!

> Now, there were several design decisions in this:
> some features were redundant, dropped for more integration and
> interoperability.

This is a good thing! But it seems some people didn't think it was taken
quite far enough:

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1280

I suppose the workspace/viewport was one such redundant feature, it
seems to have been reduced to only workspace now, which is a pity since
workspaces aren't 2d (or can I do 2x2 workspaces?).

> some features introduced bugs or were unmaintained, dropped until
> somone wanted to reimplement them and maintain it.
> 
> some were just there with noone who knew what it was, this was a lot of
> in sawfish, where features or code that wasn't understandable was
> dropped and slimmed down in favour of a working and understood project.

Well, I can imagine! There were however some features that I can't
believe were unused that are nowhere to be seen in in Sawfish's
configuration tool (e.g. box versus opaque move/resize).

> But, the main issue here is, What features do you want? And, -why- do
> you want them? a neatly argued case can well get the feature you miss,
> or the configuration you miss, back into the system, or it may let you
> in on where its hidden now.

Where do I turn to argue? (Somewhwere on the Gnome site, I suppose, or
to you directly?)

> yes, a lot of features are still there, but hidden by default due to
> usability.

This is where the lack of documentation hits you in the face. I *really*
liked my sawfish setup from gnome1, but I couldn't use the configuration
tool to get the same behaviour in gnome2 (a combination of bugs and
removed options). Everything seemed to be in sawfish still, but I now
had to edit my ~/.sawfishrc instead... and the documentation for sawfish
is ok, but many of the global settings for features are undocumented. It
was possible to do, but a nuisance.

One more thing: my menus in gnome2 don't contain the items my gnome1
menus did (I seems to have gotten loads of games instead). I can't find
a menu editor... help!?

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                    (OpenPGP: 0x6A83A7DF)
magnus.therning@wanadoo.nl
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~magus/

Si hoc non legere potes tu asinus es.
(If you can't read this you are an ass.)

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