I tried to find a mailinglist for "general" GNOME-discussion, and this seemed to be closest thing to that. My apologies if this is in a wrong list. I have been using KDE for years. I started with SuSE back in 1998-1999, moved to Debian, and from Debian, I moved to Gentoo. Then I took the step to Kubuntu, and happily used it for quite some time. But I think that it's a good idea to try out new things every now and then, and while I had tried out GNOME occasionally, I decided to give it a prolonged test. So this is not a case of being fed up with KDE. I still love that desktop. I just decided to try out GNOME for a change. Besides, seeing how GNOME does things might make me more productive member of KDE-community, since I can learn from the good (and bad) points of GNOME. Anyway, I replaced my Kubuntu-desktop with Ubuntu-desktop. I also upgraded to Dapper, which has GNOME 2.14, so I'm all set. First things first: Do I like GNOME? Yes, yes I do. And I feel that the more I use it, the more I like it :). Good job, GNOME-devels! You passed the first test. First, the good points: - The UI is very clean and streamlined. I know it has been repeated to death, but it's true. KDE is a bit on the busy side, whereas GNOME is clean and more serene. And serene is good :). - Most of the time, things just work. And that is a VERY good thing Now, that's only two good points, but they are major ones. Transition to GNOME has been pretty easy, so there's not really that much to tell. My wife is using it without any problems, and she did have problems with both KDE and Mac OS in the past. So it seems that the goal of making GNOME easy to use, has been mostly achieved :). Now, some downsides: - GNOME does suffer from lack of useful features in places. I know that some people feel that features get in to way of the "serenity" I mentioned earlier. But that does not have to be the case. And related to this: Maybe things "just work", because they don't do as much as their counterparts in KDE do? That said, I have managed just fine without those whiz-bang features from KDE (apart from few exceptions. Read on). Now, some suggestions (I do plan to check the bugzilla for entries about these): Regarding the features: I could REALLY like GNOME to have similar "network-agnosticsm" as KDE has. Meaning: remote files and folders could be worked on just like they were on the local machine. An example: I have some photos on a remote FTP-server, and I wanted to import them to F-Spot. Now, there just is NO way for F-Spot to directly import those photos from the FTP-server. I tried adding a connection beforehand to the server, but F-Spot would still not work with it. On KDE it would have not made any difference where those files would be. I could have imported them straight from the server. To the app, it makes no difference that are those files in the local-machine or in a remote server. In GNOME I had to first download the pics to the local machine, and import them from there. All in all, it was a hassle, and there was no reason for it to be so difficult. I disabled the scheme where mounted devices (USB memory-sticks and CD's for example) are shown in the desktop (I like my desktop clean). And it works well. But that makes unmounting those devices very difficult. The device is shown in "Places", but there is no way to unmount the device from there. Nautilus is also opened by default when I plug the device in, and it shows the contents of the device. But there is no direct way to unmount the device from there either. How can I unmount it then? I need to go to the "Computer", right-click on the device there, and select "unmount volume". How about making it possible to unmount volumes straight from "places" and Nautilus's sidebar? OK, I just noticed a strange thing... if I have "Places" on the Nautilus sidebar, I can't unmount the device from there. But if I change it to "Tree", I can then right-click on the device and unmount it. Why the difference? Speaking of Nautilus.... There is one very strange thing in Nautilus. When I have "Places" in the sidebar in Nautilus, why do I have to double-click on the "Places" (filesystem, desktop etc.) in order to make their contents be displayed in the content-area? In just about every other system, it's enough to merely select the thing. As it happens. in "Tree"-view, selecting IS enough to display the contents. Why the difference in behavior? Consistency is the key, IMO. Since I wanted to move to GNOME entirely, I decided not to use Firefox (or Konqueror). Instead I decided to use Epiphany. And it does work well. But there are few downsides in it. And just about all of them are related to tabs. For starters, the scheme of opening a new tab with the mouse is somewhat strange. There is a menu called "Tabs", but it does not contain "New Tab". "New Tab" is in "File"-menu, which IMO does not make sense. Yes I know that Firefox has it there as well, but does Epiphany have to follow Firefox here, when there is more logical alternative available? "Tabs" is the place for all things related to tabs, yet it does not contain an entry for creating a new tab. Weird. There is also the issue of having several tabs open at once. And Epiphany doesn't handle that situation that well. It can only display handful of tabs at once, while Firefox can display lots of them. So I'm quite often in a situation where I have to scroll the tabs around, and I have to go through all the tabs, if I want to access a tab on the other side of the tab-bar (scroll-buttons go through the tabs). Regarding window-management.... There is one feature from KDE that I REALLY miss in GNOME: Window-specific settings. Those made things so much easier. In KDE I could have certain windows open automatically in certain workspaces, making effective use of workspaces really easy. I haven't found a way to do that in GNOME yet, which means that when I want to have certain app in certain workspace, I either have to go to that workspace before I launch the app, or I have to launch the app, and automatically move it to the correct workspace. All that could be automated in KDE. I could also use the window-specific setting to automatically hide windows. When my GNOME-desktop loads, it automatically loads GAIM, and it displays a window. I then have to manually close that window. In KDE, I could simply tell it to not show the window, reducing he amount of needed window-management. Also, if the user rolled the mouse-wheel over the desktop in KDE, it automatically switches the workspace. I haven't found similar feature in GNOME yet. Related to taskbar: I noticed that GNOME has one cool feature I have learned to like: If the titlebar of a window is really long, the buttons in the taskbar increase in size so they could display the entire titlebar. And that makes them very easy to hit with the mouse. But why stop there? Why not make the taskbar-buttons use maximum amount of space by default? If the user has only one app open, it's taskbar-button would cover the entire taskbar, making it VERY easy to hit that button. When the user launches another app, the taskbar gets halved between the two apps. If the user launches a third app, each app get a third of the taskbar, and so forth. Why should there be un-used space in the taskbar? One more thing: Cut & Paste. Is it just me, or does the UNIX-style select & copy work weird in GNOME? If I select a block of text, unselect it, and click middle mouse-button in some other app (for example, when copying text from Gedit to Evolution compose-window), it does not copy the text. I have to leave the text selected in order for middle-button copying to work. Is there a way to REALLY make the system copy the text to clipboard the moment it's selected? OK, I just tried copying addresses from one text-field to another in Evolution, and middle mouse-button copying would NOT work. Is there any way to make this work? Please? Or is this a distro-problem? Now, when you read my text, you might think that I have lots of complaints. But that's natural, since I used another system for years, and I came to appreciate it's features. And when I move to a system that does not have them, the complaining starts :). But I DO like GNOME, and I will probably stick around using it. But if some future version of GNOME would have those pet-features of mine, I would be one happy camper :). Rgrds Janne _______________________________________________ gnome-list mailing list gnome-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-list
