On Fri, 2005-09-02 at 12:44 +0300, Bozhidar Batsov wrote: > Hello, > > With the upcoming release of the new GNOME 2.12, I want to say a couple > of things... > 1. Arch is said to do not have a default desktop environment - even so, > I was left under the impression that a lot more work goes into building > quality KDE packages than GNOME's, which is somewhat acceptable as I'm > aware of the fact that most people use KDE anyway. But you could at > least personalize GNOME with Arch splashsreens and default wallpaper the > way you do it with KDE. You could include be bug reporting tool in > GNOME's menu and so on. I noticed that even Xfce was more personalized > than GNOME by default... Than spend some time verifying that all is > working at least half as good as it should, for KDE runs perfectly in > Arch in most ways, but GNOME has many issues...
I agree there are some common problems in archlinux that make installation of gnome and gnome-extra a bit hard for the common user. At this moment I'm preparing 2.12 in testing with new mozilla products, which fix these bugs. I don't bother to fix these in current as our plans are to get things moved from testing to current/extra within the next two weeks. Fixing things in current is double-work at this moment. For the customization: I agree that a default gnome install is ugly. I prefer using themes like clearlooks and I'd like to make those nice and shiny themes the default theme. Lucky us, the upstream GNOME guys did for us. At this moment with gnome 2.12 RC in testing I'm facing some problems that need big customizations. This also involves patching up KDE (why is KDE always making regressions out of progressions, they fucked up with hal 0.5.x also, had to make a new hal backend myself :X) > 2. Why is the KDE package installing all sorts of useless apps and GNOME > without the gnome-extras package is barely useful... I for example know > how to take care of things, but many user might not know... Gnome contains the panel, the desktop, applets, nautilus and metacity, nothing more. You don't always need all apps that make up the complete gnome desktop and developers platform. We splitup these packages in two categories: one to make up a usable GNOME desktop and one with additional applications. When I install GNOME, I just install the gnome group and install additional applications I want by hand using pacman, without the gnome-extra group. > 3.If the maintainers are too busy with other stuff to produce quality > builds of GNOME maybe we should start a small project - something like > FreeRock and DropLine to provide the de facto standard GNOME for Arch > Linux... At this moment I'm doing my best to produce quality builds of what is about to become GNOME 2.12. This comes together with the planned GCC4 move and operation libtool-slay, an operation to increase the quality of packages. This operation eats a lot of time from us. > That's all from me folks. I'd like to congratulate all the Arch core > developers and maintainers which with they work have proven that they > may be outnumbered but they are never outgunned ;) > > Best Regards, > Bozhidar > > P.S. I still hope that someone can give me some advise as to what is the > problem with my current 2.10.2 installation of GNOME, if it isn't bad > packaging... My advise: if you know what you're doing, upgrade to testing and report bugs whenever you see one. I think I've done 75% of Gnome 2.12RC now, so filing bugreports against it would be the right time, as the final version is expected within a week. _______________________________________________ arch mailing list [email protected] http://www.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch
