Sun, 04 Sep 2005
Gnome annoys me
I've been using Gnome for about a year now, after having been an Enlightenment user for about three. Even though E had far more bugs in it than Gnome (and E was no longer being supported upstream), I managed to bear E far more than I do Gnome now:
- For starters, Gnome has to stay off of my keyboard setting. I share
my home directory across machines of different architectures—i386
(even though that box is broken now), powerpc (mac), and SPARC—and
their keyboard settings are different: the PC has a regular PC 'be'
AZERTY keyboard; the mac has a mac AZERTY keyboard; and the SPARC has a
type5 QWERTY keyboard. They're all different keyboard mappings (although
the differences between the mac and the PC are not that huge, they're
still different enough so that I need different settings on both.
However, Gnome insists in changing my keyboard setting to what it thinks
is 'right'. This sucks. The fix is quick ('use default' in the keyboard
setting dialog) but annoying, and I have no clue how to completely
disable this crack.
Even if my home directory was not shared across my different machines, I'd still like Gnome to stay off. As an example, I'm typing this on the SPARC while logged on to my laptop through XDMCP -- the SPARC's monitor is larger, while the mac's processor is faster. Since they have a different keyboard layout, however, I need to manually set it again every time I switch from one machine to the other... - The Gnome people seem to have the habit of removing features under
the pretext of
usability
. That's crap; things I knew how to do under Gnome 2.8 now suddenly require me to manually fiddle with obscure gconftool-2 commands for no good reason other than 'it confuses users'. And by reading their documentation, I found that this isn't the first time they did this kind of bullshit. If it confuses people, hide it behind an 'Advanced' button please, don't throw it away. - Gnome doesn't have a decent window manager. The default one—metacity—refuses to allow me to place my window above the top of my screen. I know what I'm doing, thank you very much; software should not attempt to be smarter than me. Using alternatives, such as openbox (which is what I'm using right now), doesn't help very much either—it has the exact opposite problem: mostly every application I start has its title bar above the top of the screen by default. Using a 'save settings on exit' option doesn't seem to help any, either.
- I've previously blogged about how gconf adds an 'mtime' attribute to every entry in its %gconf XML-files, and how it updates those upon every modification made to the entry. This makes maintaining my homedirectory in svn unnecessarily hard. Granted, this is internal, and I don't see it as likely that the Gnome people will ever change this; but it still is annoying.
And there are probably some other things. Summarizing, it feels as
though Gnome is coded for unexperienced users. That's cool, but in doing
so, I'm afraid the Gnome people have forgotten that there are also some
power users who'd like to use their software. I'm finally fed up with
Gnome now, and want Something Better™
. What, exactly, I
still have to figure out. Perhaps I'll go back to E and have a look at
fixing the one bug
in the thing that annoys me the most; perhaps I'll consider a switch to
ion3, which I've heard
lots of good things about and which seems interesting; it's just that
some things I've seen when people were using it on DebConf scare me a
little bit; mainly because of bugs in other applications, but they
still reflect on the usability of the window manager, IMO.
Also, it appears to be a bit of a spartan environment, which I'm not
really a fan of—I (still) like E because of its features, and
switched to Gnome for the same reason.
In any case, I will not 'switch' to KDE. I used it quite some time ago (back in the 2.x days), and didn't like it, mainly because I think their look and feel has too much of an in-your-face attitude, and the recent screenshots I've seen haven't changed that. But that's just me.
Other suggestions are welcome.
