If the sane defaults provided by your distro are good enough that you don't have to change them, then why aren't you whining that your distro's KDE is broken and dumbed-down?


You're not listening. I'm not surprised. I have no problem with defaults. I have a problem with making it deliberately difficult to change them. That in effect nails them down. Look, I don't know how old you are, do you remember what REALLY made Windows popular? Not useful, popular.

It was the ability to customise it. The ability to tweak it, to REALLY make it 'yours'. That's why tweakUI and related animals are among the most popular utilities in existence. If your point had any muscle behind it, there WOULD BE NO TWEAKUI FOR GNOME. No need for a tool that makes it easy for casual users to change the settings you and the Gnomes say that users don't want to change anyway, and that power users are satisfied to used Gconf to do.

IOW, you're blowing smoke - again.

bombarding Joe Sixpack with hundreds of settings he's likely never to use is just a bad idea; it wastes his time, it's confusing, and it makes him more likely to break things.


Something I don't see, as I said, and with good defaults don't generally need to change. In order to justify your stance, you make up stories about 'what users do with KDE'. I call bullshit on this claim right now. Casual KDE users DON'T spend an inordinate amount of time crawling over the config screens after KDE is set up; instead I believe this myth is part of the rationalisation that Gnomies are using to justify the LACK of configurability on their 'chosen desktop'. The idea of sane defaults I agree with (how could I not?). I do think the Gnomish defaults are annoying and clutter up my desktop, though. So much for vaunted usability, huh.

all the configuration options are still right there in GConf, and accessible via a GUI application that ships with GNOME and is in the menu system by default


But Oh! I can go into the Registry on Windows too, to make changes! And Look! It Has A Gui App, Too - regedit. That makes everything all right.

Bah.

And - by the way - when the samba browsing didn't work on Nautilus last time (that piece of crud) nobody could tell me how to even look at the settings, more or less change them. Making it hard for a home user to admin and service a system, oh, yeah, that's a good thing too. Right? Right?