Re: Vincent Untz and the "users that like to hate people"

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Sun, 2013-02-17 at 23:57 -0800, Dylan McCall wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 8:24 PM, Ma Xiaojun <damage3025 gmail com> wrote:
> > Well, GNOME fans, can you answer me a simple question:
> > Does using GNOME require skills like text file editing and/or command line?
> If you're using GNOME to administer an email server? Yes, of course!
> An attentive reader will of course say "there's no GNOME app for
> administering a mail server," to which I would respond: "Precisely!"
> and "But actually, there's a perfect one: Terminal. It's very
> familiar, and it even has colours."

Actually there is "YaST" on SuSE / openSUSE.  And there is gyrus.  So
there is a bit of love for that topic.  But, correct, it is primarily a
command-line thing;  but that is a sys-admin task, not an end-user task.

BTW, I do administer mail servers from GNOME.  Very happily.

> to run Firefox with a particular command line if you want to use a
> specific profile, or even to open the profile chooser. (With that
> said, you might be interested in the ProfileSwitcher extension).

Yep.

> JAR files? Yeah, I'm not a fan of those either. With OpenJDK, at
> least, you can execute a jar application if you right click it and
> choose the JRE from "Open With", but it does seem a little unhelpful
> that File Roller is the default handler. Fortunately, there are
> definitely some nice ways to solve this that don't involve menu
> editors :)

I access JAR files via file-roller regularly.  It seems correct to me.
Often times there is nothing straight-forward about launching a JAR file
- which entry point of the JAR file did you want?  But who is randomly
scooping up JAR files are trying to run them?  That is an *extremely*
esoteric thing to do.

My one and only time I needed to create an XDG .desktop file was/is to
run a proprietary Java application; as it does not package a .desktop
file.  That is a bug in the application.  And Java apps are generally
very poorly designed in how they name and reference resources - so that
particular task is really one for a developer.   Generally the name of
their main window in the window stack ends up being
org.launcher.Launcher... and something stupid.

> Anyway, launchers. I think the nicest way about this is to simply
> notice that in GNOME 3, launchers (and search providers) are very much
> static things that belong (with a near one-to-one relationship) to
> applications,

Yes, of course, because applications are what you "launch".

> So, you want to choose between different profiles for Firefox? 
> Great! Do that with Firefox 

Yep, which is where it should have been all along.

> When I first looked at GNOME 3 I was kind of put off as well. I cut my
> losses and let the shell guide my workflow a little more, and as soon
> as I did that it suddenly turned into my favourite thing ever. 

Same here.
<http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com/2011/05/fortnight-with-gnome3.html>

> So, err, if you just block the Linux desktop stuff from your memory and
> let GNOME 3 be its own thing for a moment, it could lead somewhere
> surprisingly nice.

I became glad all the weird cruft is gone.  And the additional tools
like Overview [which does documents as well as applications] and the
GNOME Journal [AWESOME!] are great productivity enhancments.  It is all
about the content and the data after all;  get me to the applications
that get me to my data.

<https://live.gnome.org/GnomeActivityJournal>  Install it yesterday!

-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>