Re: GNOME2: A Year Later...
Greg wrote:
From OS News... Appears to be about what I was feeling then and am now, very nicely put.
Amazing, for starters, that Eugenia found something pleasant to say about anything that's not BeOS. But never mind that.
GNOME applications have for quite some time suffered a number of vexing plagues. One the Dependency Graph from Hell, of course. Their attitude is "Just install everything!" Yucko.
Then there's the revenge of the HIG-fascist mindset: Not content with having made life on MacOS surreal and mildly unpleasant, they now want to infest the rest of *ix. I remember, a year or so ago, Seth Nickell pronouncing (on linux-elitists, I think) that standard emacs-style command-editing keybindings would have to vanish, because they felt the GNOME Foundation owned Ctrl-A or something. (I don't think I've ever heard a loud Bronx cheer over a mailing list before, but the reaction was unmistakeable.)
And last, there's the configuration shell-game. Looking under ~/.galeon, I naively expect to find my Galeon configuration file, or at least somewhere I can create one based on /etc/galeonrc. And hey, I wouldn't even mind if it ~/.galeon/galeonrc were in XML, since that's the wacko religion du jour. But no: The configuration is crammed god-knows-where within /usr/share/gnome-2.0/ui/*.xml (which I suppose collectively are supposed to comprise the fabled "GConf database"), and I'm not allowed to change how Galeon works without also changing how unspecified numbers of other applications work.
So, I use AbiWord, Galeon, Gnumeric, and Mr. Project despite those annoyances, not because I think that sort of brain-damage is A Good Thing. And it's nice to know that the moment the loons in charge of such things step too far, the more-useful of the projects can be forked to restore sanity.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
