Re: RH6.0 Gnewbie usability questions

[Matthew Berg <wdomburg pce net>]

> 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?

As I believe someone else pointed out this is in the realm of the window
manager, not the behaviour of gnome pager.  Unfortunatley E doesn't seem
to handle it correctly.   

> 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?

Between loading one desktop environment, the support libraries for
another desktop environment, and an memory-leaking piece of bloat like
Netscape 4.51 you are likely WELL into swap space.  

This is not a matter of Gnome being slower, but having more shared
libraries and programs loaded being slower.  Try running KDE while
making use of some native Gnome applications and you'll see the same
thing.

Another factor of what you're seeing is probably just E. Not to say that
I don't like E, especially on systems where I memory and cycles to
spare, but its configurability comes at a price.

My current project is to write a window manager designed specifically to
be run as part of Gnome, simply because /any/ general purpose window
manager will have some degree of useless code when run as part of a
desktop environment. 

> 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?

Not wrong per se, but the wrong way to gauge performance. 

As for running KDE apps under Gnome, that isn't quite correct - they run
BESIDE Gnome, on top of X.
 
> 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.)

>From one properly behaving window manager to another, it's a matter of
changing it in the control center.  

Window managers are supposed to take unmapped windows and add them to
the save set so that when a new window manager takes over it can take
control of the windows. 

> 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?

What version of Enlightenment are you using?  Mine does this fine.
 
> 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)...

The single window area idea works on a palmtop as a result of what you
use it for.  On the other hand when I am coding, I may prefer to have
two portions of the source code in two different windows so I can
reference one without obscuring the other.  

If you want to have multiple tasks switchable taking up the whole
screen, just maximize your applications and use the keyboard bindings
and/or tasklist to switch between them.
 
> 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?

People have been working on the documentation.  The Gnome User's Guide
has had a lot of work done on it since the one-dot-oh release, and more
is coming.  This /is/ a free project and the stock answer to the
question is "if you're unhappy with the state of something, starting
coding/documenting".

Matthew Berg