Signing off, bye bye Gnome (at least for now)

[Magnus Therning <magnus therning org>]

I'm about to leave all the Gnome mailing lists, but I thought I'd
leave a short thank-you note first in an attempt to explain why I, who
has used Gnome for the last 5+ years, have decided to jump ship.

I started using Gnome because it simply looked better than anything
out there.  The GTK+ toolkit has always had a nice look, and the
themes available allowed me to make things look interesting and fun.
I used Metacity for a while, and but then I discovered Xmonad and felt
it was a perfect match, especially when run with a full Gnome session
behind it.  I had the best of all worlds, a WM that was quick,
responsive and minimal, and it was backed up by a user friendly
environment that offered a great file manager, file associations that
worked and configurability that suited me.

Then some of the configurability was hidden away.  Thankfully there
are still hackers out there who dig out how to configure things in
gconf and dconf, that combined with a good search engine was enough to
let me accept the situation.  Then Gnome3 arrived.  Arguably the
slickest and best-looking DE available.  Visually stunning, and
innovative in how you interact with it.  However, it did have one huge
drawback, it removed the ability to replace the WM.  That turned out
to be the straw that broke the camel's back.

I've now tried to live with gnome3 basically since it came out, but
now I'm done.  I've installed awesome and am in the process of putting
in place the bits and pieces that I need.  Will I miss Gnome?  Oh
sure, some things I will miss that's for sure.

Thank you, it's been great, but for now I've had it.  I'll be back if
I ever read that the Gnome developers decide to again power users in
the target audience.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                      OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4
email: magnus therning org   jabber: magnus therning org
twitter: magthe               http://therning.org/magnus