On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 8:24 PM, Ma Xiaojun <damage3025@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Well, GNOME fans, can you answer me a simple question: > Does using GNOME require skills like text file editing and/or command line? If you're using GNOME to administer an email server? Yes, of course! An attentive reader will of course say "there's no GNOME app for administering a mail server," to which I would respond: "Precisely!" and "But actually, there's a perfect one: Terminal. It's very familiar, and it even has colours." > If your answer is No, let's see some other questions. > … I'll just assume my answer counts as No. If you use multiple versions of Firefox and each of them has a different profile, I'm going to make a crazy bet here: you are probably comfortable searching for help online, you are probably doing some amount of web development, and so at a minimum you are comfortable editing text files. I expect that is the case for any person in this situation. After all, the last time I checked you need to run Firefox with a particular command line if you want to use a specific profile, or even to open the profile chooser. (With that said, you might be interested in the ProfileSwitcher extension). JAR files? Yeah, I'm not a fan of those either. With OpenJDK, at least, you can execute a jar application if you right click it and choose the JRE from "Open With", but it does seem a little unhelpful that File Roller is the default handler. Fortunately, there are definitely some nice ways to solve this that don't involve menu editors :) Anyway, launchers. I think the nicest way about this is to simply notice that in GNOME 3, launchers (and search providers) are very much static things that belong (with a near one-to-one relationship) to applications, so as long as you aren't building your own applications you'll be much happier just not thinking about them as things you can change. Yes, not the same as it was, and yes, you can totally change them with with a tool like Alacarte and that will be reflected in the overview, but give me a moment. As I understand it, many of these interactions you are used to from GNOME 2 are simply moving from the shell to the individual applications. So, you want to choose between different profiles for Firefox? Great! Do that with Firefox (or maybe a search provider some day). Find yourself running some terminal commands somewhat frequently? Edit your .bashrc or .profile and stick them there. Maybe an alias is what you need. I like this kind of thing because applications have much more capacity to express themselves than a bunch of launchers (or file names) ever did, so the faster you get to a space controlled by the application you're interested in, the better. This does cut back on our ability to create clever hacks in vanilla GNOME 3 (I remember adding a launcher to my panel, back in the day, to toggle desktop effects), but you can be as clever as you want with shell extensions (https://extensions.gnome.org/) or with awesome applications like GNOME Do. The shell just isn't that malleable thing any more: to a big extent, it's a fixed point — a known quantity — (and it takes up a lot less space by default), and you can add the cool bendy stuff yourself. When I first looked at GNOME 3 I was kind of put off as well. I cut my losses and let the shell guide my workflow a little more, and as soon as I did that it suddenly turned into my favourite thing ever. So, err, if you just block the Linux desktop stuff from your memory and let GNOME 3 be its own thing for a moment, it could lead somewhere surprisingly nice. Dylan _______________________________________________ gnome-list mailing list gnome-list@xxxxxxxxx https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-list
