<quote who="[EMAIL PROTECTED]"> > I'm not suggesting 'throw the baby out with the bathwater' but over and > over everywhere you look kde is more polished than gnome ...
I don't think "everywhere" is true at all, but particular examples are good, because the offer the opportunity of explanation. > Recently I asked this list howto avoid screensaver lock when closing the > lid on my laptop (ubuntu/gnome) Martin answered about using gconf-edit. > Someone else answered about xscreensaver settings (oops why 2 answers). > Turns out neither is totally right and neither is totally wrong! Until 2.12, GNOME deferred to xscreensaver for config and integration. So we'd run xscreensaver as the daemon, and xscreensaver-demo for the config tool. Unfortunately, xscreensaver and its maintainer were never fully invested in modernising the Linux desktop in integration terms - i18n and a11y have always been big issues with xscreensaver, and it turns out that screensaver stuff really needs to be fairly tightly integrated with power management policy and so on. So for 2.14, GNOME shipped gnome-screensaver (which operates much like KDE's fork of xscreensaver that they did ages ago). The distros shipped gnome-power-manager, which was not included with GNOME 2.14 due to integration issues. g-p-m is the policy daemon that interacts with HAL (another project spearheaded by GNOME developers, which has resulted in all the funky device autoconfiguration through the desktop projects). Thus, there was a synchronisation issue with the integration of these components, because distros decided to forge ahead with g-p-m. Often this kind of trail-blazing is good (it's one reason why HAL works so well), but in this case the results were less than stellar. > KDE does it in the intuitively 'right place' and it works. Depends which distro you run, and the choices they've made about power management and screensavers. :-) > Another EG I setup (by accident) the logout button to LOGOUT not give the > Reboot / Shutdown / Logout options. Many tries at google, many hours > trying every option known to man! Ah Ha there it is under Sessions! This is another distribution / desktop desynchronisation issue. The logout dialogues in GNOME 2.14 and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS are substantially different, as Ubuntu decided to do something completely different on their own, so had limited resources for integrating their changes in a really polished way. I can't express how frustrating it is when suboptimal distro choices impact appreciation of GNOME, but that's how it works. (Additionally, the organic growth of the GNOME control-center module over the last five years has not been kind to its structural sanity - we'll get to that though. At least we don't have to have a search interface for the preferences GUI though.) - Jeff -- linux.conf.au 2007: Sydney, Australia http://lca2007.linux.org.au/ "Stick to your guns and get it right." - Havoc Pennington -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
