Re: My first impression of GNOME 3

[Adam Williamson <awilliam redhat com>]

On Wed, 2011-04-20 at 10:10 +0200, Sebastian Spaeth wrote:
>  
> > On theming: I believe the GNOME team felt that supporting theming comes
> > with more drawbacks than benefits. The drawbacks are that it introduces
> > far more complexity - i.e. things that can possibly go wrong, that then
> > get blamed on GNOME - and it detracts from the ability to present a
> > carefully considered appearance. Neither Windows nor OS X (nor any
> > smartphone OS I'm aware of) provides an official UI and support for
> > theming, and there's no great outcry that it should be available on
> > those;
> 
> Oh last I checked my WinXP, it had an appearance setting dialog which let
> me both select the look of windows and buttons as well as a color
> scheme. So I am not sure that no one else provides no themeing support.

yeah, it's been pointed out to me later in the thread that I was wrong
on that one. d'oh =) now waiting for someone with a clue to chip in.

> > I'd suggest just auto-starting them; if you're going to run them anyway,
> > why do it manually? gnome-session-properties lets you do this, though
> > it's somewhat deprecated; I believe the intended design is that you
> > simply leave the apps you want running, and suspend the system when
> > you're done, so you never have to re-launch them because you're not
> > restarting.
> 
> Actually, this is what I mostly manually did after booting, I clicked
> all the 5 icons to start the apps and left them open most of the time. I
> did not know about gnome-session-properties (I know that in gnome2 you
> could configure the autostarted apps quite easily in the preferences in
> the Session & autostart (?) section, but I couldn't find anything like
> that in the new properties.

gnome-session-properties *is* the app from GNOME 2. You may need to
install some package to get it available, though. Don't know what that
would be on Ubuntu.

> Is there a way, to have apps be autostarted somehow and be stoved in
> some specific "workspace"? That would solve my needs.

g-s-p will let you set anything to be autostarted. Making it appear in a
specific workspace, I'm not sure if that's possible. (I'd like it to
remember I always want Firefox on the right-hand screen, but alas, this
seems impossible...)

> > > Next, some empathy messages popped up there: my contact 'lwn.net'
> > > announced (displayed with a picture of my coworker who I am sure has
> > > never heard of LWN) that Fedora 15beta has been released. That picture
> > > of my coworker talking about Fedora had me nearly freak out.
> > 
> > Not sure what you're reporting here; the wrong buddy icon is an obvious
> > bug (file it) but other than that, empathy messages showing up in the
> > notification area is a feature.
> 
> Yes, I was reporting the icon buddy bug, which I will file. But again,
> all emptathy messages popping up here, leads to many dissruptions in my
> workflow. Everytime, my identi.ca contact finds something interesting,
> I have to interrupt my work with emacs now. I am not sure what the
> solution to this really would be. I could think of several ways to deal
> with this:
> 
> a) be able to configure emphathy which contact messages should lead to
> notifications and which not.

this seems reasonable to me, or perhaps empathy should default to not
treating twitter-type service messages as notification-worthy, since
they're not really conversations. But I can't really speak much to this
as I don't use empathy or anything like twitter and my workflow for this
stuff is somewhat 'different' - I pipe absolutely everything through
bitlbee (see http://www.bitlbee.org/img/comic_3.0.png :>)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net