Re: Scroll to zoom in/out.

[Ryan Peters <sloshy45 sbcglobal net>]

On 04/14/2010 09:29 AM, Rovanion Luckey wrote:

I don't understand why everyone wants to run GNOME Shell with a dock. It clutters up your screen, uses a lot of memory (especially Docky), and it just isn't necessary at all.

 

First you make the statement that a Dock is in no way needed.

 I admit, I am using a dock right now, but it's DockBarX, so it sits on my panel while giving me that awesome program grouping that docks give you in a much more compact way.

Then you go ahead and tell us that you do indeed use a dock, not the Docky that you despise but another dock.

Besides of visual and some very minor functional differences these two applications are the same to the user. They are designed around the same concept and fill the exact same need. They are docks, the names of the applications indicates that enough.

I personally think of it as a "more compact on-panel application switcher". I guess my definition of dock is a little different than yours. Second, I'm only using this dock in GNOME 2. I don't need it in GNOME Shell because of how it's designed.

Now this is not a discussion suitable for this mailing list so I will stop at that.

I didn't exactly want it to continue either, to be honest. I wanted to point out how GNOME Shell is just fine without a dock and doesn't need one. It groups programs in the overlay and it would be redundant to have that feature in more than one place. GNOME 2 doesn't have the overlay, so thus I use DockBarX.

Just one more thing:

GNOME Shell doesn't need a dock, never will, and if you want a different way to access your applications, just use a dock yourself or wait until someone develops an add-on for A similar feature.

We do not want to create the shell as a product that when it is out, people will talk about it in terms of: "Yes gnome shell is wicked cool! You just have to add a dock for window switching and then it is totally awesome!". Gnome Shell should be released as a finished product, not something where the general consensus is that you have to change and add a lot of stuff to get it working. It should simply work.

I think you mis-interpreted what I said there. There are lots of people that use Firefox, for example, mainly because of its add-ons/plugins. On its own, without any add-ons at all, Firefox is a great, stable, and fast program that shows how great free-as-in-freedom software can be. The developers of course realize that they aren't perfect and they never will be, so they let people change the program to fit their needs/wants. Personally I'd be using Chromium, Opera, or something similar right now if I wasn't able to customize my browsing experience to fit my needs (tree style tab, ad blocking, script blocking, cookie blocking, read-it-later, etc.)

The main reason I use GNOME and similar desktop environments is because they not only make it easy to "jump in and go" without needing to configure anything. But the thing is, GNOME is simply a "desktop environment"; just a framework for how we use our computer. If there's some minor detail or feature that GNOME does not provide that some people (thought not necessarily everyone) would like, like a dock-style mechanism for switching applications, we can't say "no you can't do that" because we can't stop them. If the dock add-on is good, very good, it might even lead more people to use GNOME Shell.

I do agree with you that we should try our very best to make GNOME Shell readily usable (and I love it how it is right now), but like Firefox, we shouldn't tell people that they shouldn't "do their own thing". This is one of the reasons I moved to Linux: we're "free" over here to do things with our system that Apple/Microsoft won't let us do, mainly because it "isn't our system" if we used their OS's. For example, the CSS customization of GNOME Shell, or the panel applets in GNOME 2.

I apologise if this email was interpreted as aggressive towards you Ryan Peters, it was not meant as such.

'Tis fine, none taken. I just hope I don't seem like I'm mad at you :). Sorry for sounding rather... "noob-ish"? Is the correct word?