Dependence on Gnome's System Menu

[Rocco Stanzione]

As a non-Gnome user I've become increasingly frustrated with Ubuntu's 
dependence on Gnome's configuration/administration interfaces.  My first 
problem was with the removal of alsaconf, which admittedly sucks, in favor of 
using the Gnome interface.  I even submitted a patch to asoundconf to make 
life easier for non-Gnome users that was rejected (at first) with the 
explanation that Gnome's interface was the preferred alsa configuration tool.  
Today I'm working with CUPS and I see that /admin in the web interface is 
effectively disabled "for security reasons" and that I should instead use 
Menu System > Administration > Printing, which of course I don't have.  KDE 
has a similar interface, but it currently doesn't work very well out of the 
box, at least for me, and maybe I don't use KDE either.

I'm objecting here to our habit of crippling or even removing more traditional 
configuration and administration tools in favor of a very specific interface.  
I'm all for Gnome having such wonderful tools, but similar tools have existed 
without Gnome for a long time, and it frustrates me to see them abandoned 
with the apparent assumption that all Ubuntu users are Gnome users.

Since CUPS caused the frustration that prompted me to post this, let me 
address it specifically.  CUPS listens only on localhost out of the box.  If 
I'm not mistaken, the Debian package we get it from only allows users in the 
lpadmin group to access /admin.  These two facts combined leave me pretty 
comfortable with allowing access to /admin, and frustrated that I have to 
hack up cupsd.conf on every Ubuntu installation to facilitate it.

Anyway there seems to be a philosophy here that Gnome config tools are the way 
to go, and if there's something we don't like about another tool, we remove 
or disable it and point users to something like "Menu System > Administration 
> Printing" which, again, I for one don't have.  Questions on various forums, 
even development forums, about CUPS administration and audio configuration 
are inevitably answered with instructions for accessing the appropriate Gnome 
tool.  I'm happy to contribute to alternative solutions, but it seems the 
kneejerk reaction to anything like that amounts to "Rejected: use the Gnome 
tool."

</rant>

Thanks,

Rocco Stanzione