[ubuntu-studio-devel] gnome vs kde (regarding: The problem with gnome)

[Len Ovens]

On Tue, 15 May 2018, Alexandru Băluț wrote:

> 
> On 15 May 2018 at 18:51, Len Ovens <len at ovenwerks.net> wrote:
>
>       I will say kde does try to make as many things possible as can be
>       imaginable. gnome tends to tell you "this is whats good for you eat
>       it."
> 
> 
> GNOME is responsible for the products it makes—When one option works and your
> resources are limited, it's simply wasteful to implement two options. It's not
> fair to interpret this as "this is what's good for you eat it." That's called
> good management.

Gnome3 from the outset would not run on my resource constrained computer 
that every other DE would run on (even unity). So not good management, 
not great use of resources. The above in my opinion is just not true.

> The team discussed and chose a path and everybody interested at the time had the
> option to take part. Now the direction is set, and their exceptional focus can be
> seen in how efficient, clean and elegant GNOME looks. 

And low possibility of getting any wark done. I fail to see how that can 
be "elegant" unless I am using my computer for a door stop. I suppose if 
removing things that help one do work is clean that at least is true.

I'm sorry, but I find gnome session next to useless unless I do lots of 
mods, look for extra modules that do things that any desktop should have 
built in... even openbox with no DE does a better job at least for getting 
work done. Now for using a browser and a mail editor gnome is fine... 
maybe even wonderful.

> You always have the option to use whatever works for you, if you really need
> Motif window decorations or whatever.

You need to reread what I wrote apparently. I did not suggest we should 
use motif decorations so much as that some DEs (gnome among them) could 
learn something from them.

When someone works on particular code it is easy to get focused on what 
that code does. In the case of DE code, it is easy to spend so much effort 
on making the desktop look nice that the use for the desktop in the first 
place gets forgotten. That is as a place to run applications and it is the 
applications that matter. It is true that gnome is fine for the average 
person that uses their computer for entertainment where they use firefox 
or chrome and nothing else. To be fair this may even be what most computer 
users do. However, for content creation where a number of tools are being 
used to create one product all at the same time Gnome is painful. Studio 
is not catering to browser users, but content creators. My first 
impression of gnome session was when is this thing going to load, followed 
by the realization it was already loaded and the tools I needed had been 
removed. From what I have seen the way gnome has been fixed from that time 
is by adding functionallity back in that should have never left.

My desktop does not need to be an elegant looking picture that is merely 
nice to look at. I am not sure what happened to "the user is right" in 
gnome's mind, but it sure gone.

Sorry for ranting, but elegant? Good for limited resources? Ah, no.

In the end, I think personal POV has a lot to do with what is nice and 
what is not nice. The key to these things is configurability. Any DE we 
have set aside has been set aside for that reason, it is hard to configure 
to some use other than the DE author's idea of the world.

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net