Re: Desktop Architects

[Martin Cracauer <cracauer cons org>]

Mariano Surez-Alvarez wrote on Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 03:16:01PM -0300: 
> If you browse bugzilla, you'll notice that patches tend to be slow to
> come, though.

There are two questions here:

1) why would people who care about configurability so much use GNOME
   in first place, given it's low reputation for configurability? And
   if they have the skills to come up with patches they have the
   skills to use a less user-friendly desktop.

2) why do projects like GNOME and Fedora receive so few patches in
   relation to their userbase, or even in absolute numbers? Is is that
   they have a reputation of accepting them kicking and screaming and
   generally having an attitude to deny bugs (not from the developers,
   it's the auxilary people hanging out on mailing lists and forums
   who deny anything you throw at them).

> > Personally I am at the edge of ditching GNOME because I can't figure
> > out how to put different background pictures on my different screens
> > (non-Xinerama, fvwm2).  It's nothing life-threatening or even
> > productivity-damaging.  But it shows that there's some seriously short
> > thinking here (different aspect ratios on both displays make a
> > same-picture policy a joke).  It doesn't help that I cannot find the
> > code that actually does the picture display for the background.
> > Digging through starting from the gconf variable names didn't get me
> > far.
> 
> If you google for "gnome different background per-workspace" the first
> result is <http://live.gnome.org/PowerUserTools> which includes a link
> to an app called wallpapoz which does apparently what you want.

I don't need it per workspace.  I need it per screen in a dual-screen
setup.

Why would I mention the problem with different aspect ratios for
workspaces? They have the same aspect ratio.  The screens however do
not.

> The request asking for this has been sitting on bugzilla for quite a
> while (the bug is #48004) waiting for someone to come up with a sensible
> design for the feature. Implementing it will probably be quite trivial,
> -once- a sensible design is drafted. 

Again, that bug report is about workspaces, not screens.

> > It's mirroring my first GTK+ programming experience where I was
> > looking for the $DISPLAY holder that is passed around in contexts,
> > only to see there is none.  It's a hardcoded global variable so that a
> > GTK+ application cannot (or at the time could not) open GTK windows on
> > more than one display at the same time.
> 
> FWIW, you have been able to use gtk_window_set_screen
> <http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/GtkWindow.html#gtk-window-set-screen>
> since gtk+ 2.2, which was released in december 2002.

I was having the problem back in early 1.x days.  I'm glad it's
fixed.  I keep wondering whether a general tendency for hardcoding is
still part of the GNOME process, though.  The example with the screens
(not workspaces) is just one.

Martin
-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <cracauer cons org>   http://www.cons.org/cracauer/
FreeBSD - where you want to go, today.      http://www.freebsd.org/