RH6.0 Gnewbie usability questions

[Nate Cull <culln xtra co nz>]

Hi all

I'm one of those poor souls running Red Hat 6.0.  I'm a Win32 sysadmin,
though a relative newbie convert to Linux, having only been running it for
about six months, but my main home machine is Red Hat now.  My preferred
desktop until now has been KDE 1.0, and I'm still using Red Hat 6.0's install
of KDE 1.1 as my main desktop, but I'm very interested in switching to GNOME. 

However, there are a couple of usability issues with GNOME that, as a
reasonably clueful Windows and KDE user, strike me as utterly and totally
bizarre, and I'm wondering what the heck I'm doing wrong.  Can anyone help?

1.  The GNOME Pager panel applet does not appear to raise windows when the
taskbar buttons are left-clicked.  It gives selected windows the focus, but
does not move them to the front.  I can raise a window correctly by
double-clicking both mouse buttons at once, but this makes all task-switch
operations about four times more complicated.  This is NOT the expected
behaviour for anyone used to KDE's KPanel or the Win32 Taskbar.  What am I
missing?  Tell me this is a bug, and not a feature?  

2.  On a genuine Intel Pentium-MMX 200 with 32mb RAM and 127mb swap space,
GNOME 1.0 (gnome-core-1.0.4 with the default Enlightenment-0.15.5 wm as
pre-installed by RH6) appears about 2-3 times slower than KDE 1.1 when running
my standard Internet browsing applications (Netscape 4.51, kppp 1.6.2, kmail
1.0.20).  Is GNOME/Enlightenment *supposed* to be slower than KDE/kwm, or am I
doing something wrong? 

Yes, I *know* that running KDE apps under GNOME is almost certainly the Wrong
Way To Do Things.  I'll try again using GNOME-only apps, and see if my
performance improves.  But kppp 1.6.2 is the best GUI PPP dialer I've ever seen,
and it seems a shame to drop it if I can help it.  I'm also aware that 32mb RAM
is a little on the light side, but again, if KDE can handle it, then presumably
GNOME should?  I also assume that GNOME's placing the KDE menu on its own start
menu indicates that KDE apps *are* supposed to be runnable under GNOME?

3.  What the heck:  Just for the record, what *is* the GNOME project's position
on integration with KDE?  Are we aiming at eventually moving these two desktops
together, or what?  As a programmer, I don't want to have to support two
separate desktop environments.  As a user, I just want my apps to run,
whatever my GUI looks like.  Tell me we're going to unify GNOME and KDE
somehow.  Please?

4.  Enlightenment is cool, but I doubt I'll need all that much chrome, and if
the window manager is slowing my system down I'd prefer a small, fast, manager
than one with all the bells and whistles  RH6 appears to have installed
WindowMaker, and I'd like to try it instead.  This is almost certainly an X
newbie question, but  --- Is there an easy way to change active window
managers under GNOME?  In RH5.2 it was just a menu selection, and in KDE it was
a Henry Ford's choice: only kwm.  (No big deal; I'll figure it out eventually,
but there's probably an easy way and a hard way.)

5.  Again on window managers:  Under both KDE and Win32, when I maximise a
window, it does not resize to the entire screen, but it respects any existing
open panels (KDE's KPanel and taskbar, Win32's Start Bar and Office Toolbar)
and resizes only to the visible desktop area that is not occupied by panels. 
This is *good*, and this is what I want GNOME to do. 

However, GNOME 1.0/Enlightenment appears only to respect the Panel when it is
located at the bottom edge of the screen, and then only when opening new
windows, not resizing them.  In fact, when I maximise any window under GNOME/E
it appears to always resize to the full screen, either obscuring the Panel or
obscuring part of the window.  As a Windows/KDE user who lives by maximised
windows and non-obscured panels, this is extremely annoying and effectively
renders GNOME unusable for me as a primary desktop. It also seems like a simple
enough thing to do, since kwm manages it.  Are there any plans to make
Enlightenment respect the Panels and resize windows properly to avoid obscuring
them, or is this not the X way of doing things?  If not, what is the correct X
equivalent that I should be using?

6. (A tangent, not entirely GNOME related): The more I use GUIs, the more tired
I get of the traditional overlapping-windows, messy-desktop metaphor, and the
more I want to experiment with alternatives.  I have a PalmPilot, and using it
was a revelation.  PalmOS has *no* overlapping windows: just a single
screen/window area, and a separate (constantly visible) task selector.  It's
the most usable GUI I've ever seen.  Since GNOME seems to be the world's most
configurable and hackable desktop, I'm wondering if there's a way to imitate
this kind of interface in GNOME.  Are there any window managers out there which
force all displayed windows to be tiled rather than overlapped (you know, like
Niklaus Wirth's Oberon system, or OS/2 Presentation Manager 1.1)?  Yes, I'm
aware I'm being a neo-Luddite.  Never mind.  Maybe I'll look at this as my own
personal programming project (hey, I've got to learn gtk+ sometime)...

7.  Since the release of RH6, I expect there will be a lot of Gnewbies from
the  Windows and KDE worlds who will open up the Red Hat boxed pack and trip
over these (to me obvious and baffling) usability glitches, and hit the
gnome-list with similar puzzled questions.  I checked the GNOME FAQ yesterday
and it appears to be at least five months old (update date of 1998).  Is there
a separate Gnome-List FAQ, or if not, will the GNOME FAQ be updated with a
section on Red Hat 6.0?

Regards
Nate

--
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nate cull  culln@xtra.co.nz  http://members.xoom.com/culln
1776 tea party 1917 red square 1989 berlin wall 1998 linux
free your mind. free your operating system. free the world
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