Gnome 2.0 look

[Gérard Milmeister <gemi bluewin ch>]

I am a very happy user of GNOME 1.4 and so I am looking forward to GNOME
2.0.
I installed it using the latest garnome. I am afraid to say that I am
very much disappointed by the appearance of it.
I fact, the work behind the scenes seems to be worth the effort.
However, I think especially the fonts make for an ugly look.
I don't care about font aliasing, and I expect GNOME 2.0 to look pretty
much the same as GNOME 1.4 whose appearance I love.
Honestly in my opinion, nothing looks as well as the bitmap Helvetica 12
pt font included in X11. I was unable to choose this as a desktop font
for GNOME 2.0; I always get an ugly scaled font, and AA doesn't make it
better. A further problem is with the new gnome-terminal. My preferred
font is the neep font by jmk. Although I was able to select this font, I
had only the choice between 2 sizes, one of which wasn't even available
as bitmap. The same is with misc-fixed, where there are only 1 or 2
sizes to select from. Although the new terminal is better than the old,
I wonder why there was no merging with multi-gnome-terminal: it really
rocks.
I think, I am not alone with this criticism, as numerous forum
discussions testify, that complain about the ugliness of GNOME 2.0
screenshots.
Another point is, that widgets seem to be a bit cramped in contrast to
GNOME 1.4.
These problems may be due to a local garnome installation, and maybe
solved by a forthcoming offical GNOME 2.0 release (perhaps by Ximian),
but till then I am quite disappointed and would not like to show it to
people to demonstrate the aesthetics of GNOME.

This comments are meant to be constructive, as I am a big fan of GNOME.

Regards

-- 
Gérard Milmeister
Tannenrauchstr. 35
8038 Zürich
gemi bluewin ch