GNOME Settings Area Getting a Refurbishment (gnome.org) 151
jones_supa writes: Allan Day has written a blog post today about some of the improvements that are being worked on for GNOME's settings area. The new GNOME Settings area is working toward a model that uses a list sidebar for navigation. The window is now resizable, and overall should be a nice upgrade. The new GNOME settings area certainly bears some resemblance to the Windows 10 settings app. Work is also ongoing specifically around improving GNOME's network settings, redesigned sound settings, experiments around improved display support, and various other enhancements to GNOME's settings area. For now, this work is considered experimental and all may not be completed in time for the GNOME 3.20 release in March.
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GTK isn't GNOME at all. Why is GTK ruined?
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GTK isn't GNOME at all. Why is GTK ruined?
I'm not saying I agree or disagree, but here's one take on it [littlesvr.ca] from a developer using gtk.
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Bugs were introduced (probably not on purpose) into GTK2 after GTK3 was released, and those bugs will never be fixed. For example I periodically get bug reports for one of my applications which I’ve traced down to GtkFileChooserButton and it’s a known issue noone will fix in GTK2.
Gtk2 is still maintained and as far as I know there are no immediate plans to stop that. We had a gtk2 release just last month which fixed eight bugs.
Huge parts of GTK2 have been deprecated, for example:
The horizontal/vertical Box layout scheme, which is how you were supposed to do all layouts in GTK2, and despite the deprecation warnings from the compiler there has been no alternative layout mechanism identified in the documentation.
The entire thread API, which is at the centre of any multi-threaded application. I don’t know if this was replaced with something else or dropped completely.
The GtkVBox/GtkHBox classes are deprecated but the documentation names several alternatives, the primary one being GtkGrid which combines the functionality of both classes.
I don't know what he means by the thread API. The GThread API is not going anywhere if that's what he mean.
The new library is clearly unfinished. For example the GtkAboutDialog is simply broken in the current version of GTK3.
Not sure what he means here. As far as I know it's used by several applications.
Serious bugs in GTK3 are ignored. For example I spent a day researching why they broke the scrollbars in GTK3, found that it was probably done accidentally (the new functionality doesn’t fit even their own designs), filed a bug, and five months later – still not so much as an acknowledgement that this is a problem.
I
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I spent several years looking for an alternative to GTK for C programming (not C++) and eventually found the xforms toolkit:
http://xforms-toolkit.org/ [xforms-toolkit.org]
I do most all of my programming in C and mostly use ncurses but now for the occasions that I really want a gui I use the xforms toolkit.
It's similar to ncurses in that it hasn't changed significantly in many years, isn't likely to, and isn't going anywhere. It has an old-school X11/CDE look, but that suits me fine since I'm an old-school programmer.
I can reco
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GTK has been ruined, so I doubt usability would ever get close
Is it GTK, or is it the built in dependence on systemd? Like I gave GNOME 3.x a try on this PC-BSD laptop, and it took ages to load, and was REALLLY slow. Ultimately, I got rid of it.
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Protip: Linux kernel development is highly dependent on corporations.
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Yes, but that just brings a truck load of other problems that we use Linux to avoid in the first place.
I don't want my computing infrastructure to be dependent on some corporation in a foreign country that I have no control over and only have their own self-interest in mind.
On the other hand, Gnome has no reason to exist. KDE was there before Gnome and has been working just fine since last century.
Yeah, I switched to PC-BSD after my introduction to Windows 8. I do have a different work laptop that had Windows 8 and which I've upgraded to Windows 10, but I do love the PC-BSD one and use it for most of my personal work.
I agree on GNOME. It was initially an interesting concept and project, and had they embraced a few GNUSTEP concepts to incorporate some Object oriented aspects that were so good in NEXTSTEP, it would have had something really great going for it. It could have combined those aspects
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Yes, but ... no, but ... FLAT!
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Welcome to the Metro design philosophy:
- Make all containers as big as possible instead of based on the content.
- Assume that everybody runs just one app at a time, full screen, with no Z order support.
- Remove resizing.
- Convert any text you can to upper case. (The two gentlemen named Davis and daVis should obviously both be called DAVIS.)
- Use the same visual presentation for bread text and links.
- Remove borders, especially on clickable elements.
- Remove rollover hints.
- Avoid color shades like the plag
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FTFY.
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Holy fuck! When I look at the screenshots I see huge areas of empty grey and white space. Yeah, I know some spacing is visually helpful, but in those screenshots HALF OR MORE of the goddamn window's area is this useless empty space! What the fuck! When I paid damn good money for a 28" monitor it was because I wanted the fucking screen space to be filled with useful information, not wasted with fucking idiotic amounts of totally useless empty space!
I have an 8" Winbook tablet, and it just won't take the version of Windows 10 that allows you to have 4 columns of tiles instead of 3. So I have 1" borders on either side in tablet mode. Ridiculous!!!
It'd be more useful to use that 28" w/ a Mac. If you have the budget for a 28", you'd probably do best w/ a Mac Pro.
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These are things you touch once (Score:1)
So why masturbate over it?
Gnome devs - how to improve Gnome (Score:5, Insightful)
Try listening to your users instead of implementing whatever eye candy and widgets you dreamt up after the 5th pint and 2 shots the night before. Just a thought.
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I'd say a good deal of their speaking users shed out of the ecosystem years ago when then adopted the 3 abortion, but that's just my opinion IMHO. I just dropped into the thread for morbid curiosity. But hell, if its better for their existing users then Kudos?
Re: Gnome devs - how to improve Gnome (Score:4, Insightful)
Henry Ford consistently gave his customers something useful, even if they didn't initially know that they wanted it.
The GNOME 3 devs consistently give their users something terrible, even after the users clearly explain that they hate it and don't want it.
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Re:Gnome devs - how to improve Gnome (Score:5, Funny)
If you ask your users what they want, you'll deliver just that, not what they're going to want when the next release is delivered.
Hear, hear! Look, listening to users is a obviously a dead end. Users, selfish as they are, only care about usability. I mean, just imagine: If UI designers listened to users, there would have been no Windows 8! That means there'd be no tiles, active or otherwise. We'd all still be putzing around with old-fashioned desktops like a bunch of putzes. That, in turn, means that users might be able to feasbily use more than one program at a time! Shudder!
In Gnome, there would be no hot corners and no overview. There would still be minimize and maximize buttons on the windows, and they might even be on the right side of the title bar. For God's sake, the taskbar might still be on the bottom of the screen! Heavens preserve us!
So count your blessings. If not for the selfless charity of our modern rockstar UX gurus, gracing our poor selves with their genius innovations, we'd be living in a veritable Stone Age where the applications running on on operating system were actually considered more important than the OS itself.
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Hear, hear! Look, listening to users is a obviously a dead end.
You joke, but if you were listening to users we'd also not have iPhones or cars. Sometimes you just need to do something and see where it lands.
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As for the iPhone: well, who's "we", kemo sabe?
As for the automobile, in some ways it really is just a better horse. We use the automobile for exactly the same reasons as we used the horse: to move people and things from place to place. Only you don't have to feed the car as much, house it as well, or treat it as carefully. If something breaks on it, you can generally just replace that part, instead of shooting it and burying it in a giant hole. The car's waste products are easier to deal with, at least
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As for the iPhone: well, who's "we", kemo sabe?
A large portion of the Slashdot crowd for one. Don't think I've forgotten about the days where people were talking about a concept that would never work due to a lack of buttons, no keyboard, it being too hard to type, too small, too fragile, too %insert other reason here%. There was a time before people would rabidly salivate at the prospect of an iPhone release announcement. Ironically enough a large portion of the people are the same.
Speaking for myself, I don't remember ever saying anything close to "I wish that some mysterious buttons would appear whenever I moved the mouse pointer to the edge of the screen"
Oh I agree. Guess what? Windows 10 doesn't do that. That's the entire p
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If you ask your users what they want, you'll deliver just that, not what they're going to want when the next release is delivered.
Hear, hear! Look, listening to users is a obviously a dead end. Users, selfish as they are, only care about usability. I mean, just imagine: If UI designers listened to users, there would have been no Windows 8! That means there'd be no tiles, active or otherwise. We'd all still be putzing around with old-fashioned desktops like a bunch of putzes. That, in turn, means that users might be able to feasbily use more than one program at a time! Shudder!
In Gnome, there would be no hot corners and no overview. There would still be minimize and maximize buttons on the windows, and they might even be on the right side of the title bar. For God's sake, the taskbar might still be on the bottom of the screen! Heavens preserve us!
So count your blessings. If not for the selfless charity of our modern rockstar UX gurus, gracing our poor selves with their genius innovations, we'd be living in a veritable Stone Age where the applications running on on operating system were actually considered more important than the OS itself.
A problem I have more with Gnome than with KDE or xfce is the emphasis on the left mouse button. You can hardly do anything without clicking that forefinger button. With Gnome it can take 7 mouse clicks to get something done, with the others mentioned, it takes two. Try that for 8 hrs of software development per day.
And I kid you not, I have carpal tunnel problems with the ligaments/muscles controlling my forefinger. Gnome is a health hazard.
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Spoken like a true Gnoome fanbooy.
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The time from extension development to deployment of an extension with the end-users is much lower. I think that's generally good.
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Linux Desktops (Score:2)
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There's not even that much of a difference between them and Windows in the first place.
The Linux desktops appear to have not yet discovered the concept of remembering the size and position of a window when the window is closed, and using that size and position the next time the window is opened.
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I made a similar comment a few days ago about KDE, and was told the new version does that. Well, yes, but it has to be manually enabled on a per-window basis, instead of with a global setting.
I could find the global setting to center all windows when they're open, and a bunch of other global setti
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As with Windows, this is really up to the application. Windows apps store this information on the registry and then request that size and position on next launch. Linux apps often do similar things, at least with size. Many apps are poorly written. But quite a few seen to remember their last size. Position is harder to get right because users may use multiple desktops so fixing the position isn't always the right thing to do.
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As with Windows, this is really up to the application.
Yet Windows apps tend to do that by default. All of them that I use do that.
Many apps are poorly written. But quite a few seen to remember their last size.
Very few seem to remember their last size, in fact not one of the apps I have used on a GNU/Linux desktop remembered its last size/position. So far, it's just been major apps like Firefox, Thunderbird, the KDE apps, etc. because I get too frustrated with it before I have a chance to move on to the more minor apps I need.
So instead of the constant stream of excuses and rationalizations why a windows on a GNU/Linux desktop canno
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So instead of the constant stream of excuses and rationalizations why a windows on a GNU/Linux desktop cannot do something as simple as remember its size and position when it is closed, why doesn't the Linux community try to fix the problem?
What should it do if you run multiple copies?
On multiple displays?
On multiple servers?
There's also another good reason why the starting position is calculated, and that is to preserve the ability to use overlapping windows. To mark/paste between windows you need to see at least some of the window, and the window positioning algorithms take this into account.
The Windows approach where only the front window is active and positions are remembered pretty much breaks any mark/paste functionality, which is a big
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On multiple displays?
On multiple servers?
What all reasonably sensible software should do when faced with a choice:
Ask the user what he wants with a default that is useable in all plausible circumstances.
There. That was not so hard, was it?
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Understand that it's a second window of the same type and act accordingly.
Think back guys, it's a thing that was handled well before this site even existed! Rob Malda wrote themes and applications for the a window manager that could do it FFS!
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That's one of the features of Enlightenment since about 1997. It probably has a setting for the centre thing as well.
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Under X11 applications are responsible for remembering their own positions,
When I was trying out the latest version of KDE a couple of days ago, I found the menu on the top left of the window that provided the ability for me to manually set the "remember" options manually on a per application basis.
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That menu looked the same across all the applications, with the same options, leading me to think it was more of a KDE type of function than an application type of function.
To your point, isn't KDE an application in the eyes of the X11 system that it runs atop>
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Under X11 applications are responsible for remembering their own positions, because they're the only ones that can actually know a window's identity (ie. what it represents). To a window manager a window is a picture with just a couple parameters, eg. the title.
This is not accurate. Under X11, the X server may not always be on the local machine, and the window size and position may vary depending on where the display is. Files like $HOME/.Xdefaults-$hostname are meant to keep track of this, so different settings can take effect depending on where your X server is.
Of course, gnome has screwed this up big time, and invented their own system that doesn't work well remotely.
systemd is a bigger problem than GNOME 3. (Score:2, Interesting)
A couple of years ago, I thought it was GNOME 3 and Unity that would be most responsible for retarding the adoption of GNU/Linux on the desktop. Both are, in my opinion, fucking awful to use. I find them extraordinarily inefficient to use, I find that they look like shit, and their UIs are completely unintuitive. No normal user would want to use them, and no poweruser would want to use them either.
But then systemd was installed on my Debian GNU/Linux desktop, and GNOME 3 because the least of my problems. Al
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I don't like SystemD ... at all. But I'm also sick of people crying "My system won't boot .. crashes .. whatever"
SystemD does actually work. It has a horrible command line interface, bad command line UI, does too much and is probably filled with insane amounts of security bugs.
It does solve the problem of full process management (sorta...I've had processes that have stayed alive after SystemD killed them...which shouldn't be possible) and it has created a unified init file configuration (upstart did this th
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Yet sometimes it does not. Hanging on a wireless mouse USB dongle in one case with me, halting while trying to start ZFS where /home was mounted in dozens of instances for another. Those are both situations where an init system should not just hang there with no chance of user intervention. The previous system had fallbacks and allowed services to be skipped.
It's beta software pushed as if it was release quality and
Not a concern for me yet (Score:2)
I am among some many users still on Ubuntu 14.04 and waiting for 16.04 or on Mint 17, waiting for Mint 18 so not caring much yet.
In fact, I'm more concerned about whether the driver support will get better and the applications better and less buggy.
The window is now resizable, (Score:2)
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Isn't that the application's responsibility?
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>>Does it remember the new size and position when you close it?
> Isn't that the application's responsibility?
Just like calculating which disk cylinder and head you should write your data to, it sure becomes the application's responsibility if the OS doesn't do it.
NO! Are you MAD!? (Score:3)
Cathegorically, *no*. X11 forbids the application from having any say over where its windows appear. At best it can give a hint. The Window manager is totally free to ignore this hint.
I know this, because I was tasked with implementing an application on Linux once that had a user requirement that the windows should come up where the user last left them. I couldn't figure out which arcane combination of window hints and X11 calls made a window appear at those coordinates, so I asked on the internet - and had
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From the QT documentation:
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Stop whining (Score:1)
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> I'm sure other people like GNOME.
If that was true you would have met one IRL, at least once.
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Sensitive much? Who did I ridicule and what problems did I deny? Is GNOME dying? How do you know that the overwhelming majority of users hate GNOME3? Do you have any sources to back up those assertions?
I find it annoying that whenever there's a GNOME story that instead of talking about the story (in this case, a new settings dialog), there are many comments from people stating that they dislike GNOME and what they're using instead. It's irrelevant and nothing to do with the story.
To stay on-topic, it seems
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Please link me to some solid takedowns of GNOME. GNOME 3 drove me away from Linux for quite awhile, and I'm only back on my main box now because I switched to XFCE. It may not do every single thing, but I know that I won't update one day and lose just like, every single fucking button.
Re: Stop whining (Score:2)
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Use MATE. It's a continuation of the best linux desktop ever produced.
Unless you're a command line user who doesn't speak the lingo and has a hard time remembering all the renames to things like "caja", "engrampa", "pluma", "atril" and so on. In an OS that's based on English commands, it's not very intuitive.
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Not sure what "evince" or "nautilus" are supposed to mean.
On the command line, try this one : gvfs-open. It's good if you simply want to open a file.
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On the command line, try this one : gvfs-open. It's good if you simply want to open a file.
Unless you have a non-heterogenous environment and use X remotely.
~ $ gvfs-open .bashrc /bin/dbus-launch terminated abnormally without any error message)
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gcon... [gnome.org] for information. (Details - 1: Failed to get connection to session:
~ $ Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "pk-gtk-module"
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Ah yes, makes sense.
Like that time I was trying to use xrandr not in the Xorg session context. "Can't open display". Duh.
To script xrandr, I ended up doing a setuid on xrandr and running the script in Mate's "start up programs" for what would have been Modelines in the xorg.conf, if that feature hadn't been removed.
I'm not sure what better way I should use to please the session gods and the display gods.
Resizable windows (Score:5, Insightful)
The window is now resizable
When this is listed as a new feature of an application, I think you might be a couple decades behind the state of the art.
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I never realized how ahead of its time the Amiga was. Only a few short years ago modern desktops were near UI feature quality: singly-active, full-screen programs that you can drag down to get to another one. Now all these modern desktops are working on their version of Workbench. I'm so giddy with joy waiting for them to start meditating.
The computing industry runs in circles. Learn to live with it. Ignore all upgrades and changes until it runs around to the part of the circle you like best. We're s
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I have several problems with the gnome-tweak-tool.
First: The devs just randomly delete stuff, and for a long time there was no tweak tool. Now that there is one, it's not really official in the way you'd ideally like. This means that in order to get BASIC functionality, you have to go dick around with the tweak tool. Given that most UIs are functional without a bunch of shenanigans, screw that.
Second: Settings in the tool aren't guaranteed to be supported forever, and there's no amazing way that I know
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Settings are stored in dconf and can easily be exported from there. The tweak tool is just a fancy GUI on top of dconf.
I guess the problem is that no everyone agrees on what Linux behavior is.
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FWIW, I recently (past six months to a year) went on a rampage and tried pretty much every DE out there. There aren't a whole lot of us but there are a few of us who really actually like LXDE. Yeah, it's not fancy but it works, it's light, and it can be quite elegant.
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IIRC, when I heard of the Gnome3 tweak tool a year or so ago (or whenever Gnome3 started being pushed at people) it was explicitly stated that the tweaks were temporary, and would be disabled in a future version. As I believed them, I stopped seriously considering Gnome3 as a potential desktop. If even resizing windows requires using the tweak tool, this sounds like an excellent decision on my part.
FWIW, I have no idea what Gnome3 currently looks like. Nobody's been singing its praises, though. And duri
Plagiarize much? (Score:2)
A large portion of the submitter's words were stolen verbatim from the second link [phoronix.com] without any attribution.
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Just use MATE (Score:3)
I've even tried the latest Cinnamon and I thought there were some paper cuts in there still.
Although maybe a wider monitor (to get more task bar space) and a recent graphics card or GPU would fix some of that.
Mate is predictable regardless of your hardware or whether you use a bleeding edge distro or a stable one.
No hunt for applets : too bad if you wanted an ecosystem of little applet and widget things, but the built-in ones are dependable.
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There is no reason to use MATE when standard gnome-panel does the same thing but in gtk3 with better compatibility with everything else.
Will settings app actually let you change theme? (Score:1)
Whats even worse is the 3rd party app is some python scripted crap.
Hello, I mean Windows 3.0 let you change colors and fonts, we're living in 2016 and Gnome still won't let you do what Windows could in 1993?????
Whats so insanely hard about having a built in control panel pane that lets you configure basic things without hav
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Because it was produced by a bunch of deranged Gnomes Or is there some other explanation?
Wow. Just wow. (Score:2)
They actually had a settings window you *coudln't* resize??? WTF? ... This is really unbelievable.
I didn't understand all the hype & rage in the last 15 years [slashdot.org] but not having your settings window (or *any* window for that matter) resizable is abysmally retarded. I've been making fun of Windows for this shit for the last 20 years. What harebrain had the briliiant idea to make a window in Gnome non-resizable?
I'd be ashamed to brag about a window now being resizable again.
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Even in windows it's gotten worse. Look at the control panel in win2k, then xp, then vista, then 8, then 10 (the new 'settings' one).. Each refresh takes more white space while offering less functionality. This is an industry wide problem that gnome has embraced wholeheartedly.
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I had to buy a pile of new monitors after an inhouse developer made the same stupid newbie mistake. It's the "everyone's setup must be identical to mine" idiocy that also gave us so many MS Windows applications that would only run as Admin.
I like some Gnome programs, but not Gnome Shell... (Score:2)
Oh great (Score:2)
"GNOME Settings Area Getting a Refurbishment", also known as, "What Can We Fuck Up Today?"
They'll 'improve' it until it's so ruined that totally unusable, and then they'll slap a "Done" sticker on it.
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It sounds as if they may be making a marginal improvement. Not with any of the major things that caused me to drop Gnome as my desktop, but still and improvement. Of course, that's PR that I'm listening to, and the actuality is as yet unknown. (And will stay unknown by me, as they aren't fixing any of that things that caused me to consider them totally broken.)
P.S.: I preferred KDE3 over Gnome2, and Gnome2 over KDE4, and KDE4 over Gnome3. KDE4 has gotten a lot better. Nobody seems to be saying that ab
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Settings are for advanced users, so we're getting rid of them. Using Gnome is now easier than ever!
Just use MATE - it's far superior (Score:2)
MATE is more customizable, and has way less useless crap.
First they try and emulate OSX UI now Windows 10? (Score:2)
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Reminds me of Microsoft TweakUI which I swore by 10/15 years ago. Although it was for little things (Autorun, auto-login, make arrows on shortcuts smaller etc.) not a replacement for control panel and start menu editing and so on.
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Windows and OS X have had this ability since the beginning, how hard could it possibly be to have built in control panel page to change color and font like Windows.
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What makes you think that every user wants to change things like color or font? I don't think most users want has any need to do that. There is a universal access pane in the settings app where users can enable larger fonts and higher contrast for accessibility reasons.
This thinking is gnome in a nutshell. It's why I stopped using it, and it's why I stopped bothering to develop anything with GTK.
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Windows let you change color and font since I think Windows 1.0, which was what 1990? How come Microsoft could figure out how to let users change color 25 years ago, but Gnome still can't figure it out.
What is so insanely hard about making a standard control panel pane to do this. Why does it have to be a separate download. What kind of impression do you think
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Here it is kids - the obligatory, passive aggressive, bullshit, answer a question with a question, non-answer used everywhere by apologists for bad design.
Q. - How do I change colors and fonts?
A. - Why would you want to do that?
Re: All settings moved to gconf-editor. (Score:1)
I assumed dconf is what the settings tool would replace. dconf seems to be the best or only place to find some of the settings removed from the Gnome apps but it's not installed by default (on Fedora 23). I did like the feature when I clicked dconf and it offered to install it. dconf isn't very user friendly though (org -> gnome -> ).
The trouble with Gnome is that it has left the large desktop behind and is now optimized for small touch screens. The cynic in me has concluded that this is to attrac
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Yes. This screen just looks like iPad's settings screen made uglier.
Automated Automated Slashdotter Comment Criticizer (Score:2)
ARG! slashdot users criticize specific aspects of yet another change that $VENDOR insists is an improvement.
Slashdot $USER has triggered me by not taking the feelings of mouthbreathing idiots into account, despite the fact there are plenty of simpleton alternatives for them.
If only more useful features were stripped out for lots of wizards that force workflow unnecessarily, and sensible layouts replaced with oversized widgets that waste screen real estate, then the bottom denominator would be happy. They're