[Desktop_architects] Re: Printing dialog and GNOME

[Tuomo Valkonen]

On 2005-12-14, Havoc Pennington <hp at pobox.com> wrote:
> If I don't like a neighborhood, the logical thing is that I don't decide
> to live there. Some people would probably start flaming the existing
> residents until they changed the neighborhood, but it's weird to do
> that, at least where I come from.

What about when the neighbourhood is the entire Earth? That's beginning
to be the case with Gnome, the only escape from this Mono-culture (pun
intended) being non-free software (the Moon), where some lost usability
may be regained (while also losing some things that are still -- but for
how long? -- possible under X, such as decent window managers, although
with reserve as, for example, many programs are starting to ignore the
ICCCM and fight over window size and so on).

By ignoring the needs of power users in its pursuit for a hegemony,
Gnome's success is a loss for free software in general. Windows and OS X
are starting to sound more attractive day by day as one needs to deal
with the mouse-only UI design, and the worse than bad quality of Gnome
software together with a tendency to not care to fix reported bugs.
Combine this with the increasing BSOD-type behaviour of the kernel after
2.2 (much of which may be related to the pursuit of "desktop performance"
which, of course, includes BSOD emulation), and still after 15 or so years,
not having display drivers in the kernel, thus allowing X to put the
system in a state where it only responds to the reset button from the
console.

-- 
Tuomo