17 UI sucks

[BBQdave]

Originally Posted by RupertPupkin

Last count I saw was 38.

Why such a low count, or is that the level you care?

[DBelton]

Originally Posted by dragonbite

That's also comparing something "new" with something mature.

Think of it as trying to use a tablet and moving to an ultrabook and being able to do what you needed it to do.

Not that tablets are "new", but they are "newer" than laptops and related ultrabooks.

New or mature, makes me no difference as long as it accomplishes what I need it to do, (and I certainly don't need a PlaySkool interface )

[joncr]

Originally Posted by DBelton

New or mature, makes me no difference as long as it accomplishes what I need it to do, (and I certainly don't need a PlaySkool interface )

I have no problem with the Gnome folks working on an interface for tablets. I do have a problem with them assuming that what works on a tablet will work on a desktop.

This probably comes down to resources. I.e, Gnome lacks the resources to work on two very different bodies of code at the same tine.

That said, what would all the Gnome-2-Forever people have preferred Gnome do? Just fix bugs?

[stevea]

Originally Posted by Dan

There is an extension available to add a hot corner to the upper right corner as well.

Dan, theres an extension for left-handed near-sighted zombie-apocalypse survivors, but all these extensions are spread across a lot of websites, flaky, inconsistent and/or incomplete in the non-Goedel sense. Amateur hour.

When G2 failed (in the support sense) it dumped a huge load of nice panel applets in its wake and left little room for replacements. No CPU-speed manager, no system monitor, no stock-market ticker. The G3 desktop is still a weaker & dumber place b/c of this. Ive always had a Swedish-modern, minimalist design ethic, so there are still a load of functions that don't deserve a full-blown app, and do require regulation or notice - yet have no place to go.

CPUspeed is a good example of one problem. There use to be a sweet little panel applet that allowed both observation and regulation of CPUspeed. The gui was so simple and direct that no instruction was needed. 90% of the time unobtrusive & ignorable, but when I am doing an kernel build on one desktop and an Android build on another - then really wanna know how the cores are faring. Yes I could eat up some acreage with gkrellm, but its only display - no control.

Now it's a fair argument that as fedora users we designated pioneers, and deserve whatever we get, but it appears that the self-absorbed Gnomes simple ignore the importance of the parts of the desktop experience that they don't produce in-house. Ignorant and arrogant isn't a good combination.

Of course if Gnome is running on my phone or even tablet, then I probably don't care about the crudely huge icons, the slam-it-edge-to-edge hot-corner baloney, nor do I need to worry about CPU performance policy. Thats precisely why I don't like G3. Its not pure evil, its just aimed at a different market, impure evil. Its dumbed-down for the hypothetical end-user. Children of a lesser dog.

Hats off to the truly good guys who are trying to build a palace of extensions on a steaming heap of goo. But the goo-base shifts and their work isn't stable for that reason. Blame the Gnomes. The APIs and rules should have been spelled out at phase0 of the design.

[Dan]

Originally Posted by stevea

Dan, theres an extension for left-handed near-sighted zombie-apocalypse survivors, but all these extensions are spread across a lot of websites, flaky, inconsistent and/or incomplete in the non-Goedel sense. Amateur hour.

Agreed, but the guy what came up with it was good enough to almost ... but not quite ... name it after me, so I'm perhaps especially aware of having dodged that particular bullet. Besides ... it was one I had also specifically asked for. <....>

Originally Posted by stevea

When G2 failed (in the support sense) it dumped a huge load of nice panel applets in its wake and left little room for replacements. No CPU-speed manager, no system monitor, no stock-market ticker. The G3 desktop is still a weaker & dumber place b/c of this. Ive always had a Swedish-modern, minimalist design ethic, so there are still a load of functions that don't deserve a full-blown app, and do require regulation or notice - yet have no place to go.

Agreed again. And as you mention below, gkrellm works to monitor, and I have it running on all F16 installs, but there is no speed control involved, and sometimes I wish to utilize that level of fine grain control.

Originally Posted by stevea

CPUspeed is a good example of one problem. There use to be a sweet little panel applet that allowed both observation and regulation of CPUspeed. The gui was so simple and direct that no instruction was needed. 90% of the time unobtrusive & ignorable, but when I am doing an kernel build on one desktop and an Android build on another - then really wanna know how the cores are faring. Yes I could eat up some acreage with gkrellm, but its only display - no control.

Ayup. See above comment.

Originally Posted by stevea

Now it's a fair argument that as fedora users we designated pioneers, and deserve whatever we get, but it appears that the self-absorbed Gnomes simple ignore the importance of the parts of the desktop experience that they don't produce in-house. Ignorant and arrogant isn't a good combination.

Gutzon Borglum should have carved that one into a rock!

Originally Posted by stevea

Of course if Gnome is running on my phone or even tablet, then I probably don't care about the crudely huge icons, the slam-it-edge-to-edge hot-corner baloney, nor do I need to worry about CPU performance policy. Thats precisely why I don't like G3. Its not pure evil, its just aimed at a different market, impure evil. Its dumbed-down for the hypothetical end-user. Children of a lesser dog.

... and that's most of the reason that E17 gets used more than Gnome shell around these parts. Although many of the overall changes to Gnome carry their inconsistencies and deficiencies deeper than the interface.

Originally Posted by stevea

Hats off to the truly good guys who are trying to build a palace of extensions on a steaming heap of goo. But the goo-base shifts and their work isn't stable for that reason. Blame the Gnomes. The APIs and rules should have been spelled out at phase0 of the design.

Uhm ... you mean you really can't do this?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2zqTYgcpfg

<....>


Oh, I am so disillusioned! <....>





<....>

[flyingfsck]

Xfce has various deficiences (parallel printer support, Canon camera support, USB stick handling)

You must be doing something wrong. I am using XFCE on various machines made by Toshiba, Lenovo and HP and all these things work purrrfectly.

[stevea]

Originally Posted by Dan

Gutzon Borglum should have carved that one into a rock!

After reading the wikipedia on Borglum I'm not sure he'd agree.

... and that's most of the reason that E17 gets used more than Gnome shell around these parts. Although many of the overall changes to Gnome carry their inconsistencies and deficiencies deeper than the interface.

I seriously need to give e17 a spin soon. Made a fine looking DE almost out of the box.

Uhm ... you mean you really can't do this?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2zqTYgcpfg

<....>

Great video - but it tries to convert a vice into a virtue. That's a job best left to political office candidates.

Originally Posted by flyingfsck

You must be doing something wrong. I am using XFCE on various machines made by Toshiba, Lenovo and HP and all these things work purrrfectly.

Right. Something is wrong if your printer or camera require a specific desktop. Mostly pilot error I'd wager.


I have one gnomish vice left. I still like Gnome-terminal. The key features I want are multi-tab (which several have now) and also the ability to select a profile per window/tab. When I am working hard I LIKE having different profiles (mostly the backgrounds have different tint' color) so I can distinguish remote sessions from work on A vs work on B ... Color coding really helps. The ability to tear-off the tabbed windows in gnome-terminal is nice - but I'd give that away for a smaller footprint. To bad you can't re-merge the g-terminal windows (afaik) like you can with firefox tabs.

[sonoran]

Gedit and gnome-terminal were the last remaining gnome packages I eliminated from my Arch system. Medit replaced gedit seamlessly, although I couldn't find it in the Fedora repos. And urxvt is as good as gnome-terminal. The perl extensions allow for multiple tabs, including named tabs - I haven't tried different backgrounds. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Urxvt#Tabs

This upgrade allowed me to get rid of all the gvfs, gconf, dconf and gnome-desktop-* garbage, and dropped my running processes from 86 to 74 after boot. That compares to around 225 on my more or less default Fedora 17 running openbox.

[joncr]

Originally Posted by stevea

Dan, theres an extension for left-handed near-sighted zombie-apocalypse survivors, but all these extensions are spread across a lot of websites, flaky, inconsistent and/or incomplete in the non-Goedel sense. Amateur hour.

extensions.gnome.org is the only place that seems relatively safe. At least there you can filter out extensions that don't work on your Gnome version. Still very unclear what relationship those things bear to the rest of Gnome. Gnome people are on record for telling users who ask about things, like, I need to change my cursor so I can see it, that, no, you don't need to, our cursor fits all. That attitude, more than anything the software does or doesn't do, is alienating people.

API breaking smacks of arrogance and naiveté and stupidity. I.e., stupid naive arrogance. Microsoft has been lugging their API around for years. For good reason. A lot of their developers probably hate that. I doubt you'd find a Windows user who does, though.

[RupertPupkin]

Originally Posted by sonoran

Gedit and gnome-terminal were the last remaining gnome packages I eliminated from my Arch system. ... This upgrade allowed me to get rid of all the gvfs, gconf, dconf and gnome-desktop-* garbage, and dropped my running processes from 86 to 74 after boot.

Wow, I didn't realize that Arch was so bloated.

I only have 66 processes running in Fedora 17 when I log in and run Window Maker:

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root         1  2.0  0.1  45396  3856 ?        Ss   12:17   0:03 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd
root         2  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [kthreadd]
root         3  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [ksoftirqd/0]
root         4  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [kworker/0:0]
root         5  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [kworker/u:0]
root         6  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [migration/0]
root         7  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [watchdog/0]
root         8  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:17   0:00 [cpuset]
root         9  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:17   0:00 [khelper]
root        10  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [kdevtmpfs]
root        11  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:17   0:00 [netns]
root        12  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [sync_supers]
root        13  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [bdi-default]
root        14  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:17   0:00 [kintegrityd]
root        15  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:17   0:00 [kblockd]
root        16  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:17   0:00 [ata_sff]
root        17  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [khubd]
root        18  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:17   0:00 [md]
root        20  0.3  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [kworker/0:1]
root        22  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [kswapd0]
root        23  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        SN   12:17   0:00 [ksmd]
root        24  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        SN   12:17   0:00 [khugepaged]
root        25  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [fsnotify_mark]
root        26  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:17   0:00 [crypto]
root        32  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:17   0:00 [kthrotld]
root        34  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [kworker/u:1]
root        39  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:17   0:00 [kpsmoused]
root        40  0.1  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [kworker/0:2]
root        41  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:17   0:00 [deferwq]
root       113  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:17   0:00 [firewire]
root       117  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [scsi_eh_0]
root       121  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [scsi_eh_1]
root       124  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [kworker/u:2]
root       126  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [kworker/u:3]
root       128  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [kworker/u:4]
root       162  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [jbd2/sda3-8]
root       163  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:17   0:00 [ext4-dio-unwrit]
root       184  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [flush-8:0]
root       190  0.0  0.0  27344  1632 ?        Ss   12:17   0:00 /usr/lib/udev/udevd
root       191  0.1  0.0  30756  1396 ?        Ss   12:17   0:00 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-journald
root       192  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:17   0:00 [kauditd]
root       256  0.0  0.0  27340  1148 ?        S    12:18   0:00 /usr/lib/udev/udevd
root       257  0.0  0.0  27340   980 ?        S    12:18   0:00 /usr/lib/udev/udevd
root       268  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:18   0:00 [edac-poller]
root       280  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:18   0:00 [ttm_swap]
root       326  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:18   0:00 [kworker/0:3]
root       329  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:18   0:00 [jbd2/sda1-8]
root       330  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   12:18   0:00 [ext4-dio-unwrit]
root       343  0.0  0.0   7400   416 ?        Ss   12:18   0:00 /usr/sbin/gpm -m /dev/input/mice -t exps2
root       352  0.0  0.0 118388  1396 ?        Ss   12:18   0:00 /usr/sbin/crond -n
root       354  0.0  0.0  28264  1552 ?        Ss   12:18   0:00 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-logind
root       355  0.0  0.0  11556   472 ?        Ss   12:18   0:00 /usr/bin/system-setup-keyboard
root       356  0.0  0.0 245232  1600 ?        Ssl  12:18   0:00 /sbin/rsyslogd -n -c 5
root       358  0.0  0.0  21188   872 ?        Ss   12:18   0:00 /usr/sbin/atd -f
dbus       374  0.0  0.0  21596  1296 ?        Ss   12:18   0:00 /bin/dbus-daemon --system --address=systemd: --nofork --systemd-activation
root       593  0.0  0.0  22768   940 ?        Ss   12:18   0:00 /usr/sbin/xinetd -stayalive -pidfile /var/run/xinetd.pid
root       601  0.0  0.0  49720   484 ?        Ss   12:18   0:00 /usr/sbin/vsftpd /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf
root       604  0.0  0.1  91464  2184 ?        Ss   12:18   0:00 sendmail: accepting connections
smmsp      617  0.0  0.0  78600  1780 ?        Ss   12:18   0:00 sendmail: Queue runner@01:00:00 for /var/spool/clientmqueue
xfs       1132  0.0  0.1  19744  2076 ?        Ss   12:18   0:00 xfs -droppriv -daemon
nobody    1182  0.0  0.0  74432  1164 ?        Ss   12:18   0:00 /usr/GNUstep/System/Tools/gdomap -p
root      1196  1.0  0.9 130904 19572 ?        Ss   12:18   0:01 slim -nodaemon
root      1206  1.9  2.2 148160 46672 tty2     Ss+  12:18   0:02 /usr/bin/X -dpi 96 -auth /var/run/slim.auth
root      1359  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    12:20   0:00 [kworker/0:4]
rpupkin   1364  0.1  0.0  54956  1336 ?        S    12:20   0:00 /usr/local/bin/wmaker
rpupkin   1520  0.6  0.4  68204  9164 ?        S    12:20   0:00 /usr/local/bin/wmaker --for-real

I see 7 unnecessary processes that I could drop from that list if I wanted to: gpm, atd, vsftpd, 2 sendmails, xfs, gdomap), which would bring me down to 59 processes. I love how lean Fedora is!

[sonoran]

That 228 figure for Fedora comes from gkrellm, which describes it as "forked processes," or what top calls "threads." Run without arguments top only reports 127 in my Fedora, but top -H says 230.

For Arch, gkrellm, top, and top -H all give the same number after boot - 78. So the real difference is that Arch doesn't have any forked processes initially, while Fedora has around a hundred.

[DBelton]

Originally Posted by sonoran

Gedit and gnome-terminal were the last remaining gnome packages I eliminated from my Arch system. Medit replaced gedit seamlessly, although I couldn't find it in the Fedora repos. And urxvt is as good as gnome-terminal. The perl extensions allow for multiple tabs, including named tabs - I haven't tried different backgrounds. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Urxvt#Tabs

This upgrade allowed me to get rid of all the gvfs, gconf, dconf and gnome-desktop-* garbage, and dropped my running processes from 86 to 74 after boot. That compares to around 225 on my more or less default Fedora 17 running openbox.

I swapped Gedit for Geany, here. Geany seems to be a fairly decent replacement for Gedit, at least for me it is. (plus... It's in the Fedora repos )

[Dan]

Originally Posted by dbelton

i swapped gedit for geany, here. Geany seems to be a fairly decent replacement for gedit, at least for me it is. (plus... It's in the fedora repos :d )

+1

[MALsPa]

Originally Posted by DBelton

I swapped Gedit for Geany, here. Geany seems to be a fairly decent replacement for Gedit, at least for me it is. (plus... It's in the Fedora repos )

Another +1.

I found out about Geany in these forums, and since then I've been using it in every distro, regardless of the desktop environment.

[RupertPupkin]

The only bad thing about Geany is that it depends on the vte terminal, which has a pretty nasty bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676090
That bug is apparently fixed in vte version 0.32.2, but Geany still uses the old 0.28.2 version, and even the vte3 package for Fedora still has the vulnerable 0.32.1 version.