Hoary / Gnome 2.10 : worth it ?

[troutrou]

> You can read the thread on ubuntu-devel about the menu edition:
> http://tinyurl.com/6kdwm
> 
Ah thanks. Read the entire thread. Don't have much to add. It's all
very disappointing, apart from the fact that apparently, the
new/freedesktop.org menu system allows to sort the order in which
entries.icons appear in a given menu.

> That's a shortcut detail trivial to fix ... 
Maybe it's trivial, but not removing it would have been even easier, 
no ?

> You can set a shortcut for the moment (gnome-ui-properties to allow
> shortcut changes, go and the menu item and press ctrl-H).
> 
Thanks. What the hell is "gnome-ui-properties", is it a key in gconf
(didn't find one), or a pacakage in Synpatic I must add (didn't find
one either ) ?


> What's "ugly" in the mixer ?
THe main thing that "hit" me, was all the bright red little crosses "X"
icons that replace the "record" checkbox. They really look out of place,
they stand out, they contrast too much with the Gnome smooth/eye
friendly colors. 
The other thing thzat doesn't look nice, is that for example, I have 3
controls on the second tab, but only 2 on the first tab, but the size
of the window being constant, when I look at the first tab, the two
control hardly fill the space, it looks "empty", a bit strange.

> It's much simpler than the warty one
As I said, it's hardly simple : the PCM control is on the first tab,
but all the other controls I sues ("line in" for TV, "CD" and Master)
are on the other tab, so I have constantly to select the first tab
every time I want to adjust PCM. WIth the old mixer, all the controls
were at hand, easily accessible.
More genrally, what this shows is that this new "capture/playback"
split, is not as good an idea as it may seem... unless we have a way to
control what controls go in what tab/panel, so that people can configure
things to suit their particular case and/or habits.

>  which is an improvement for many people.
I do'nt really want to start a thread on this, but I woud like to hear
what in the new mixer is better than the old one.
Don't get me wrong, I am hardly saying I miss the Warty mixer. I have
tired Gnome 2.4, 2.6, 2.8 and 2.10, and the only mixer I really liked,
was the one in Gnome 2.4.
I wish I could use the 2.4 mixer in Wart or Hoary or Hoary+1 etc, maybe
it's possible, but I don't know how to do it ! :o(

> Why not settings the line-in and PCM on a correct level and change the
> master one then ?
> 
Well yes, I can see the logic in this, and I did try to change/bend my
habits and do that. But it doesn't work (for me anyway), because I
happen to change the PCM setting quite a lot (wide variations in
amplitude I mean) depending what music I hear, and wheter I listen with
the headphones or loudspeaker, but when I listen to TV (line-in), I
always use the same level. So the problem is that when I switch to TV I
constantly have to remember to turn the master down. Whereas before,
master was set once and for all, line-in too, so whenever I start
XawTV, sound is at the correct level. 
The other problem with using only the master, is that I may have to
turn it all the way up, which in my case is not a good thing, as the
sound car's amplifier saturates -> crap sound.


> >So unless Ubuntu fixes all that themselves once Gnome is released,
> then
> >Wart/Gnome 2.8 is much better ! :-/
> You are free to keep using warty if you think so.
> 

If it were so simple :-/  I would happily stay with Warty, if all the
libraries and applications were updated/backported. But of course, this
is not the case. If you want uptodate applications, you have to switch
to Hoary (and then Hoary +1, +2 etc...). If you try to compile by hand,
you then have to download and compile hundreds of dependencies by hand,
not very practical, and may break the system, especially if you don't
really know what you are doing... :-/

> >I can see that 2.10 has nice little touches about networking
> tools/GUIs,
> >but it hardly compensates for the other problems...[/color]
> 
> You can look on this page: http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-10/
> 
Yes, I did look at this page several times before. this how I saw that
Gnome comes with nice wallpaper which are not Hoary ! :-/
It has a few nice little improvements, but the menu issue is a real
turn off.
But it had to be done, I understand the need to change things and go
forward. 
But I feel we will have to wait for the next version (is that 2.12 or
3.0 ?) to really have a reason to update. Obviously for people using
2.4 or 2.6, 2.10 is interesting. But when using 2.8, I am not sure...

Vince


-- 
troutrou