Helix Gnome Observations...

[Jamin Philip Gray <jgray writeme com>]

I've been doing some testing of the latest Helix Gnome RPMs.  Here
are some of my bus/undesirable behaviours that I discovered:

* Sometimes dragging a launcher from the panel to the desktop fails.
It creates a generic icon that won't launch the application.  

* Dragging a KDE launcher from the menu to desktop fails similarly.

* In short, the way that gmc handles dragging launchers onto the
desktop seems less than elegant.

* Applicatations such as gnome-cal and gnome-iconedit are very slow
at redrawing themselves compared to previous gnome-releases or KDE
counterparts.  If, for example, you change views from the daily view
to the monthly or yearly view in gnome-cal, there is a significant
delay while it draws it.

* GTK theming is FUBAR.  Only certain widgets such as menus are
affected by a theme change.  This behaviour is very strange and
wholly undesirable.

* The gnome menu is very slow because it always reads from disk.  I
heard this was recently fixed in CVS.  If so, sweet...

* It would be nice to be able to get rid of the bar on the side of
applets such as the tasklist.  I understand its purpose, but I don't
find it very attractive.  

* The tasklist doesn't display proper icons.  The tasklist's
behaviour is completely non-standard.  Compare it to KDE for
example.  It would be deliciously pleasing to be able to see the
applications' icons in the tasklist.  I don't know if this is a
tasklist issue or a window manager issue or both.  All I know is
that I've never seen the app's icon in the tasklist and I've used
gnome with several window managers and I've viewed hundreds of
screenshots of others' gnome desktops.

Now for the good parts:

I love the resizable panels.  They're just plain sweet.  I also find
the other panel improvements excellent.  The new ways of configuring
what appears in the menus was a great improvement.  The new icons
that have been added are beautiful.  I love where gnome is going....


----------------------------------------------------
Jamin Philip Gray
jgray@writeme.com
http://DoLinux.org/jamin/

The Christian faith has not been tried and found wanting. It has rather
been found difficult and left untried.

--Chesterton