Binary incompatibility of Linux distributions

[Michael M. Moore]

On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 20:14 +0000, marc wrote:
> Michael M. Moore said:
> 
> So the file manager also creates the desktop. That's two responsibilities 
> and breaks well established software design principles.

I was not ... and am not ... trying to convince you that nautilus is
well-designed or that GNOME is the best, one of the best, or even a
particularly good desktop to use.  Lots of Linux users don't like GNOME,
lots of Linux users don't like nautilus, lots don't like GNOME *because*
of nautilus.  They aren't right, they aren't wrong.  It's an opinion.
Everybody is entitled to one.

> > That's also why, if you want to use nautilus under a different set of
> > circumstances, you have to understand a bit about how it works and what
> > it does, so that you can modify it to work with whatever you want it to
> > work with.
> 
> You're making this up as you go along. There's absolutely no 
> justification for expecting a file manager to behave in an antisocial 
> manner, which is precisely what's going on here.

What am I making up?  Your tone is belligerent and off-putting.  Did you
want help, or just want to gripe?

> Why should I have to change Gnome's Windows' Registry? How am I expected 
> to know that Nautilus will act maliciously - knowingly negatively affect 
> the performance of every other DM except gnome - unless I change some 
> arcane registry value?

Read the man page.  Use Google.  Search Ubuntu's site.  That's three
suggestions.

> > You can't complain that something has a "bug" when it is doing exactly
> > what it was designed to do.
> 
> I can complain about what I choose thanks. This is appalling behaviour.

You can complain *about* anything you like, but you can't complain
*that* something is a "bug" when it is not a bug and not expect to be
corrected.  It reminds me of those people who say "I installed Linux and
it broke my Windows!" or "I reinstalled Windows and it broke my Linux!"
No, "it" didn't break anything ... you broke it, by not reading the
instructions or understanding what you were doing.

People get into trouble on any operating system when they go blindly
installing and trying to reconfigure things without the first idea of
what those things do or how they work.  That's among the reasons for
documentation, man pages, tutorials, etc.  We ignore those things at our
own peril.

It mystifies me why, if you have such a low opinion of GNOME and
nautilus, you even wanted to use nautilus under KDE.  KDE has it's own
file managers that many quite like.  And there are graphical,
light-weight, simple file managers designed to work in any environment
or with any standards-compliant window manager.  And there's my
favorite, Midnight Commander, that will even work beautifully in the
console as well as in a terminal emulator.  Nautilus is designed
primarily as a GNOME tool and to provide essential functionality for
that environment, which IMO it does well.  It *can* work, with a little
fiddling, outside of GNOME, but honestly I don't really see the point.

-- 
Michael M.