The rough edges ...

[Gerald Gutierrez <gutier intergate bc ca>]

Okay.

For four days I've tried to make GNOME my desktop environment and have to
admit that I liked what I saw. It saddens me to say, however, that a
number of drawbacks have caused me to revert back to KDE. To those who
care about the success of GNOME I thought I'd share some of what I
perceive to be the rough edges of GNOME 1.0 in the hopes those who aren't
aware of them are made so and eliminate them for the next release. I will
likely be unintentionally upsetting some people in this message; to those
people please evaluate my thoughts objectively through the eyes of a
hacker as well as of a potential newcomer to a non-Windows world.

-- GNOME is supposed to be the one hot attractions to entice desktop users
to move to Linux. It is supposed to lure Windows users into a better
computing world. Since most of them have never had to edit configuration
files, I think making them edit their '.xinitrc' to put in gnome-session
is already going to put a lot of them off. Don't laugh, many will notice
the strange filename '.xinitrc' and it will /feel/ difficult for them to
install and use. 

-- Once it's up, you get a bunch of windows popping up and the panel's
ready. Things look mildly familiar. Start a couple programs and minimize
one. It disappears. No icon. No indication that it is still running. And
why not? GNOME has a task list. It's part of the pager applet. Why isn't
that applet part of the default configuration? Where is there any
indication that you must put the applet on the panel to see this kind of
information?

-- I see that the control center is how I configure GNOME. How come the
window manager entry is blank? Oh I see, it's an RPM screwup. It's
supposed to run e-conf inside it. Okay. Try e-conf. How come e-conf and cc
can both set the background? How come the hotkeys can only be set through
e-conf? 

-- After playing around for a while, I notice that every now and then new
windows show up half off the screen. Sometimes the top half is off the
screen. ?!?!?!?

-- The panel forces me to use the mouse to do things. There are no hotkeys
for it. Fine. The tab to hide the panel is at the corner of the screen,
but I can't just swing my cursor to the of the screen and click! It's like
one or two pixels away, which means I have to aim for it which means I
waste tons of time.

-- Many things are fairly nice. However, every now and then programs
disappear with no trace. Why can't they catch their errors and inform the
user of what's happened? Don't the authors want bug reports? How do people
know where to send bug reports if the programs don't tell them when it's
most convenient and most relevant?

-- I want to dial up my ISP. I see about three different
applications/applets that claim to be able to take care of this for me.
Gee the applet doesn't seem to do a damn thing. The application works. It
lets me set up my phone number and other parameters. I connect. How do I
tell how long I've connected or how much I've transferred or what my
transfer speed is? What if I live in a country where I have to pay for
local calls and I want to know how much I'm being charged?

-- I want to check mail. Where's the mail client? News client? Where are
the bunch of other programs the average expects to exist on any computer?

-- I want to know more about GNOME. I've found the help browser but the
user guide's can't be found!

There are many more but since I've already uninstalled GNOME it's getting
harder to remember them. I'm sure others will find more annoyances. I
don't think these are bugs; they are just user-unfriendly things about
GNOME 1.0. Because GNOME is aimed for the average graphical desktop user,
I think these issues are extremely important. They're what makes a GUI
nice to use as opposed to annoying to use.

Other things I've noticed are that the packages don't seem to have the
imlib dependency correct. I actually installed GNOME without updating
imlib ( it was at 1.8.x ) and things just crashed with undefined symbols.
Other basic problems are such things as tight dependency on Linux and GCC.
I never saw any mention at GNOME is Linux-specific. Why is it like that in
reality?

I see a lot of good things in GNOME, but its all worthless if the many
issues showing up don't disappear. For example, I notice that many, MANY
programs crash. Linux is constantly touted as being the stable OS that
never crashes and never needs a reboot. It's true. No one has said the
same for GNOME. That's also true. But the fact that many will run GNOME on
Linux, hence giving the impression that Linux is unstable when in fact
only GNOME is unstable will greatly tarnish the Linux brandname. If it
falls, many other projects will fall, including GNOME. Should not everyone
try to live up to the good name of Linux by developing applications just
as stable and flexible and worthy?