[Usability]Gnome 1.4->2.0 experience

[Erik Walthinsen <omega temple-baptist com>]

I've just sent my laptop in for repair (again...), which meant installing
something recent on my desktop for the duration.  RedHat 8.0 it is, and
now I'm wading through the miriad of issues the transition brings.  I'm
going to try to make some sense of this, vaguely in order of running into
them.

First thing I found is that metacity (no offense, Havoc) is not very
featureful.  Compared to sawfish, it doesn't allow me even a tenth of the
features I use on a daily basis.  Simple enough, I switch to sawfish,
right?  Well, switching to sawfish was only feasible because I had an
inkling of how the session manager worked.  I had to *kill* metacity,
start sawfish from the terminal that happened to have focus, then tweak
the session manager to make it persistent.  This worked, unlike setting
the window-manager gconf key.

So now I'm back to sawfish, I should be able to tweak a few things and get
back to work,  Well, not so.

In GNOME 1.4, I had 8 workspaces (virtual desktops, viewports, whatever
they were called back then) arranged in a 4x2 grid.  Prime terminals go
upper left.  Browsers go along the rest of the top.  Coding workspaces go
along the bottom.  xmms and xchat are sticky, and in the top-right and
lower-left corners respectively.

In order to switch from one task to another, I set the Ctrl-arrow keys to
switch between these workspaces, in a geographic/geometric manner.  If I'm
reading mail and need to browse something, Ctrl-right.  If I'm coding one
(of two) project and need to browse, Ctrl-up.

In GNOME 2.0, I discover that at best, workspaces are linear.  The 2x4
grid I'm used to is only a figment of the workspace-switcher's
imagination.  There are no bindings I can set to move up or down, and
galeon's bindings have changed to Ctrl-left and -right anyway.  If I want
to switch from the upper-left workspace to the one below it, I have to
either scroll all the way through the other workspaces, or grab the mouse.
At this point the only thing I can do is grab the mouse, which puts a
significant dent in my ability to work effectively on multiple projects.

After filing a bug against sawfish explaining this regression, and being
told that it didn't matter in the slightest, I checked some archives and
found all sorts of discussion about workspaces vs viewports vs virtual
desktops vs etc., but no obvious conclusion.  I fully agree that the old
practice of having two entirely disjoint styles of dealing with it is
highly counterproductive.  It seems that "workspaces" are the norm now,
which is fine with me (though in at least one place sawfish-ui still
references both).

Problem is, the workspaces are shown as being 'physically' contiguous, but
they aren't.  I cannot switch between them in any form that relates to
their perceived arrangement, except that "next" and "previous" happen to
translate roughly to right and left.  There's no edge flipping, and I
can't drag windows from one workspace to another.  Every one of these
features is implied by the grid arrangement shown by the switcher, but has
disappeard since 1.4.  Every one of them is critical to the way I work,
and from what I can tell from the archives, I'm not the only one.

Next issue is gnome-terminal and fonts.  I used to use 'fixed' in 1.4,
which looked good and allowed me to cram up to 9 terminals on my 1600x1200
LCD.  I'm on a CRT now, which reduces clarity, but is really a moot point
since I can no longer select that font or even find a remotely
similar-looking one.  'Monospace 8' appears to have too many serifs, but
without a side-by-side I can't tell anything else.

These two issues, the window manager moreso than the font problem, make
GNOME 2.0 a *major* hassle for me to use.

For now I'm going to attempt to run two X servers, one native and the
other chroot'd off my transplanted laptop drive.  That should give me a
1.4 environment to keep working in, while I try to deal with these issues.
I'll be installing the latest gnome 2.2 snapshot and will make further
comments as they come up.

      Erik Walthinsen <omega temple-baptist com> - System Administrator
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