Re: [Usability] setting a default character encoding in gnome-terminal

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 06:25, Stefan Sperling wrote:
> he complained that he could not permanently remove all the desktop icons 
> in gnome anymore. 

You can, you just have to know how to do it. (Hidden setting.)

Someone should make a nice GUI for the hidden settings. There may even
be one on the net if you google.

>  From _his_ point of view, a desktop without icons is _not_ broken.

Everyone is different, we can't write a different desktop for everyone.
It's all a compromise.
http://ometer.com/features.html

>  Maybe there should be 
> an option to shut nautilus down entirely by default

There already is, just remove it from your session in
gnome-session-properties

> I rather break things myself and fix them than being kindly 
> taken by the hand by other
> software designers, who are effectively locking doors that should be 
> unlocked. 

Keeping people from breaking things is partly for users, but also it's
for sysadmins and those of us on the receiving end of bugzilla.

If we want things to be breakable, we could just remove all the error
handling... after all if you know what you're doing you won't type the
wrong filename. ;-)

> Anyway, I am probably running into open doors here. It is probably quite 
> hard to design a desktop environment
> that fits both technical and non-technical user's needs.

Exactly. Often there simply needs to be two GUIs; for example, there are
various WM options available and that is the _right_ way to do it, vs.
one all-singing all-dancing WM, IMO.

 I still miss a lot of its 
> simple but powerful features, like
> spawning apps with customizable keyboard shortcuts

metacity already has that feature ;-) since GNOME 2.2 I believe.

> Also, I'd like to be able to log out of gnome with a keyboard shortcut. 
> This is possible in gnome 1.4 but not in
> gnome 2.2.0!

False. ;-) Red Hat Linux binds Ctrl+Alt+Del to this by default.

>  What happened to sawfish?

Nothing, you can still use it. That's the whole point of having a
detailed window manager specification for the desktop<->WM interaction.
There are several other WMs that work with GNOME as well.

Havoc