Giving Gnome a spin and me a headache!

wilburpan · l33t Joined: 21 Jan 2003 Posts: 977

Well, I just finished uninstalling Gnome from my laptop after giving it a good two weeks of use. I normally use KDE on my work laptop and OS X at home, and I have to deal with (gack) Windows computers at work, so I am used to fiddling with different desktop environments. I was able to get Gnome to mimic most of the things that I like in OS X. I got the physical layout of the program launchers in the taskbar to match the order of my program launcers in the KDE taskbar and the OS X dock. I was able to put the close/minimize/maximize buttons in the upper left hand corner, like in OS X (I got KDE to do this, too). So at least I was able to make the Gnome desktop consistent with my other desktop environments.

So why am I bailing on Gnome now?

1. Bugginess. There are too many things that I haven't been able to fix. Epiphany crashes on me. Evolution crashes on me. Rhythmbox also crashed on me quite a bit. The sound system was quite buggy until after about a week of searching the Gentoo forums and googling. Not that KDE or OS X are perfect, either, but they both took far less work than Gnome did.

2. Speed. Epiphany in particular took a long time to load. Perhaps this is because it's based on Mozilla, which also takes a while to load, but Konqueror is pretty snappy in comparison. Also, for no particular reason that I could fathom, every so often Gnome would stop responding and then start working again after about 30 seconds or so.

3. HIG working against me. I really missed the ability to configure the Gnome menu and Epiphany bookmarks in the order that I would like, instead of being locked into an alphabetical arrangement. My bookmarks are mainly arranged in alphabetical order, but I put the most often used groups of bookmarks at the top of the menu, where it's easier to get at. Ditto for the application menu in KDE.

4. Networking issues. I could not figure out how to get Nautilus to access my network at work. Every time I would try to connect to the network, it would hang and lock Gnome. In KDE I have to mount my network shares via a terminal, but then I can easily browse the network via Konqueror, and at least KDE doesn't hang on me if I forget to do mount the network shares.

I did like the window manager speed in Gnome, when it was not being unresponsive. However, I could not say that Gnome was necessarily any more "lightweight" than KDE. I got used to spatial mode Nautilus, but could not say that it was any better than browsing mode. I also liked the menu consistency in Gnome. But the negatives far outweighed the positives.

I plan on giving Gnome another try when it hits version 2.6.2, though, to see if the bugginess has improved.
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I'm only hanging out in OTW until I get rid of this stupid l33t ranking.....Crap. That didn't work.

ralph · Advocate Joined: 02 Mar 2003 Posts: 2001 Location: Hamburg

hellbringer · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Feb 2003 Posts: 82

semiSfear · Guru Joined: 08 Jul 2003 Posts: 302 Location: Adelaide, SA

nempo · Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2004 10:35 am Post subject:

ebrostig, emerge gnome-lite ?

Gnome is a collection of packages and epiphany is a package of this collection, emerge gnome simply installs all those packages that are included in the 'gnome collection'.

[flame_food]
I know, lets try to install KDE without konquerer and see how easy that is. Didn't go to well ? Then stop bitching.
[/flame_food

The 'can't select hidden files' WAS a bug. It's fixed now. You just need to press '.' in the ctrl-l dialog and up comes a list of all your hidden files.

The mozilla devs are working on the GRE (gecko runtime environment) that will do away with all the unecessary dependencies.
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shm · Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2004 1:22 pm Post subject:

Evangelion · Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2004 1:49 pm Post subject:

ebrostig · Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2004 3:18 pm Post subject:

ebrostig · Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2004 3:24 pm Post subject:

sapphirecat · Guru Joined: 15 Jan 2003 Posts: 376

Skrot · Posted: Sat May 01, 2004 1:42 am Post subject:

IWBCMAN · Guru Joined: 25 Jun 2002 Posts: 474

Charlieg,

There is really no point in dragging this whole thing out. I happen to largely agree with you, but you are banging your head against *a* (Ebrostig's head) wall in this thread. This thread was posted as a counter-thread to the one you startedīt's only purpose is to debunk some suppossed *mythological* superiority of GNOME, and of course in so doing it simply bypasses the *actual* superiority of GNOME :evil:

Ebrostig,

The problem with gdm is a problem with the portage ebuild. The place for gdm sessions was changed to /usr/share/xsessions and the format for a session changed to a '.desktop' file, here is mine to illustrate what it looks like:

robmoss

numerodix · l33t Joined: 18 Jul 2002 Posts: 743 Location: nl.eu

IWBCMAN · Guru Joined: 25 Jun 2002 Posts: 474

numerodix,

You may find it bizzare but the statement is borne of practical experience. The KDE control center has such a bazillion options that it is almost impossible to penetrate. There are many many options that are worded almost identical to other options rendering it quite difficult to know which does which.

If I have a free afternoon it is some times amusing to simply spend a day with the KDE control center. I do this at least once every time a new version of KDE comes out-just to get a vague notion of where I should even begin to look. Then of course there is the stability option-I have crashed the KDE control center no less than a 100 times and frequently I had to restart X to get KDE up and running right again.

And most importantly I do not have the option of avoiding the control center-KDE is absolutely unusable for me in it's default configuration, so I must use it to make configuration changes which render KDE usable for me. I do appreciate the work the KDE guys have put into the control center-it is kind of like a grand central station for every option which they can cram into it.

From the vanatge point of it's sheer size, complexity and *choice* it is amazing. But this "advanatge" is a major nuissance to me. I have installed and tried every version of KDE since 2.2. As mentioned before I love certain KDE apps. but I only really like KDE, taken as a whole , for about 2-3 days.

The infinite options promise so much configurability but alas after a few days of playing around with it I get really bored with KDE- a boredom which I have never expericed with GNOME which has but a fraction of the options. I really can't explain this.

The majority of keys in gconf-editor are documented and relatively simple. Thre are exceptions, but not too many. The windows registry is totally undocumented and it holds something like 100,000 keys. Each key in gconf has very specific values of a give type which it can handle.

In the windows registry keys repeated take multiple values of mulitple different types. Full searching the windows registry for something very specific can take 2-3 minutes of pure search-function time. The gconf-editor probably has less than 500 in a normal setup-if more, not signinificantly.

If you knew anything about gnome-vfs you would undertand how superficial the suppossed similiarity between gconf-editor and the windows registry really is. Structurally they have nothing to do with one another. The only point of similarity at all is the gconf-editor itself-which is only a utility to ease displaying/changing settings.

The gnome-vfs consists of some large number of keys which are actually xml files stored in a hierarchical directory structure. These files are "live" representing the "state" of the GNOME configuration given at any time. Changes to the gnome-vfs/gconf system are immediate.

I too have some issues with gnome-vfs/gconf, parituclarly when it comes to administering complex desktop layouts for multiple users. Unfortunately KDE is still easier to configure for a multi-user setup- but not due to it's control center-but rather due to is it's easily editable configuration files which can be adapted and placed in /etc/shadow.....

But I will take the gnome-vfs/gconf system any day of the week over the KDE control center....

shm · Posted: Sat May 01, 2004 3:47 pm Post subject:

ecatmur · Posted: Sat May 01, 2004 5:24 pm Post subject:

I find the KDE control center pretty much equivalent to gconf-editor in terms of finding things, and roughly equal in working out what settings do. kcontrol has a richer interface, which can be a good thing, but some of the panels are just scary - the printer control panel is highly intimidating.
Still, I prefer Gconf because I know my way around better, and I know that most of the options I actually use are in the Desktop Preferences applets. And instant-apply is wonderful.
_________________
No more cruft
dep: Revdeps that work
Using command-line ACCEPT_KEYWORDS?

ebrostig

ecatmur

ed0n · Posted: Sat May 01, 2004 7:22 pm Post subject:

I use gnome as second hand wm, I daily use pekwm and I start gnome-settings-daemon at startup and I also use nautilus. I never had problems with gnome and worked for me, the reason why I switched to pekwm was that "it eats my memory" thing.
Erik's reasons look pure and I don't consider them untrue.
All you need is to spend more time in gnome and learn it's tricks and stuff like you did with kde.

ebrostig

ecatmur

j-kidd · Apprentice Joined: 20 Feb 2003 Posts: 213

Here are my concerns about gconf...

Many keys like "always_use_browser", "font_var_size_x-western", "0" are programmer-readable instead of human-readable. I am forced to read the descriptions.

The lack of combobox makes it further user-unfriendly. Comma separated list is hard to read, and I am forced to type.

The "Cancel" & "Ok" buttons are inconsistent with regular option dialog that only has a "Close" button. I am confused. In KDE, everywhere has "Ok", "Apply", "Cancel".

I hope these concerns sound reasonable.

IWBCMAN · Guru Joined: 25 Jun 2002 Posts: 474

J-kidd,

I know that some of the key names are not the absolute clearest-but your comment that hierarchical configuration editors are noninituitve is really silly. In reality I doubt you have ever seen a non-hierarchical configuration editor.

"Heirarchical" in this sense, in the sense in which it pertains to configuration, means "category-based". Now differing configuation editors differ in terms of how they define their categories.

The windows registry defined their categories very specificially to the internal API of windows itself- it is not human readable in the slightest and when you install software under Windows the installer ends up writing keys all over the registry-which is why a clean uninstall on windows is quite often impossible.

The KDE-control center is formed fundamentally differently. It's categories are mostly loosely based on various functional aspects of configurability exposed by the common libraries which all KDE apps use. Because all KDE apps use QT and common kdelibs- the control center is actually just a configure too for these libs-changing a config here changes all KDE applications which use these libs.

The gconf-editor under GNOME is again totally different. The categories of the gconf-editor are primarily based around installed applications which expose configurability to gconf. GNOME is nowhere near as tightly integrated as KDE/QT. Secondarily there are sections in gconf-editor dedicated to DE-wide integration aspects. This setup allows for one to configure the individual applications-per user, per session, defining defaults etc. and allows one to (re)define various interface elements which intgrate all GNOME proper elements(MIME/gstreamer audio/video, etc.)

In contrast to KDE the majority of applications used under GNOME are not themselves GNOME applications-the common denominator is actually GTK+. Those applications which are simply GTK+ based do not usually expose any configuration options to the gconf-editor. If one is using metacity as their WM changing the metacity configs in gconf will effect all applications under GNOME relevant to those aspects exposed by metacity-for example key bindings.

There is now talk about making GTK+ as opposed to gnomelibs the base dependency for GNOME applications. This would mean that GTK+ applications could export more configurability options in the gconf-editor. The fact that gconf-editor only deals with those options which the applications themselves choose to expose is what keeps the gconf-editor rather simple and light-weight.

I myself have a very complex GNOME install with lot's of apps-under my /apps key in gconf there are only 70 entries....I find this organization quite logical and quite intuitive. If I want to change an option, which is not exposed in the application itself(ie.rarely) I simply look under the /apps key to find the entry which corresponds to the application in question.

I have never spent more than 2 minutes trying to find something in gconf-as opposed to more than a hlaf hour find something in the KDE control center.

ebrostig · Posted: Sun May 02, 2004 5:35 pm Post subject: