Gnome
has been doing some worrying things recently, firstly we have the whole
new notifications debacle, it shows the rifts that can be caused by one
little thing in gnome, I hold the opinion that its “only notifications”
and am worried how easily the little things get turned into big issues.
Secondly we have Gnome 3.0. The developers again seem to split over
which direction to take the desktop environment. Some want a total KDE
style overhaul, which I think is sorely needed but see little advantage
in doing so currently; they need a new toolkit or major improvements to
be made to GTK to achieve anything they are thinking of doing, we are
looking at 2 years plus of pure 3.0 work, so obviously it will take
longer if they keep pushing out bi-yearly updates. Another group exists
however that just wants to push out Gnome 2.3 as Gnome 3.0, doing this
so will obviously have grave consequences for the project, it will be
branded by all as boring and doing nothing new…..not that its boring
and does nothing new at the moment…. Right?
Finally we have the “less options will make it simpler for users”
attitude, this is illogical, its not the number of options the user is
presented with but how they presented, which options are presented and
how they are described etc that makes an interface complicated or not,
for instance, you’re browsing though files in nautilus and you see a
script you want to run, so you want to open a console in the current
directory. In Dolphin / PCManFM (my file manager of choice) etc, you
have a simple menu option for this (or press F4). In gnome (they
removed this from nautilus as part of a simplification of the
interface) you have to open a terminal and cd into the directory…
hardly simpler! How about changing the font colour of the taskbars in
gnome? You have to hack a gtkrc file! In KDE3 you had a menu/kcontrol
option to set font colours manually, in KDE4 it is handled by a plasma
theme.
Gnome and I have always had a relationship however it has a special
place in my heart as it was my first ever Linux desktop environment,
included with RedHat 7.3. The next distro I tried was KDE based which I
loved and have been a KDE user until about 9 months ago when I got fed
up of the bloat and I switched to Fluxbox.
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