[OT] A couple of links about Gnome and usability

Peter Alcibiades palcibiades-first at yahoo.co.uk
Fri Mar 23 13:29:33 EDT 2012


Richard Gaskin wrote
> 
> Like Tim noted, any user of any current major distro who prefers Gnome 2 
> can install it and use it.   Ubuntu goes so far as to make this a 
> one-click option at login.
> 

Richard, I wish that were true, I would simply do it.  But its vanishing
from the repositories.  I am on Debian Wheezy, and neither gnome2 nor the
old version of gdm are options.  You have to compile from source to get it.  
What we have lost in gdm now is as serious as what has gone missing from
gnome3 - we have lost the ability to set up xdmcp on the host.  We still
have the ability to do remote connect from the client, but not to set it up
in the painless way we used to have on the target.  We've lost gdm-setup.  I
read on the blogs that gnome2 is vanishing from ubuntu repositories also.  I
haven't checked the latest Fedora releases.

You can get back a lot of the gnome2 functionality in gnome3, the window
control buttons for instance, and the desktop controls, but by all accounts
you have to work at it, and for much functionality you are now reduced to
editing text files.  Actually, its even worse.  It may not be terribly good
practice to log on to a gui as root, but it can be very convenient
sometimes.  Well, gdm allowed you to configure it to allow that.  gdm2 its
not an option.  There is probably some way to do it by editing custom.conf. 
But if you had it, why take it away?

This stuff turns too readily into a peevish complaint about gnome or kde. 
But the point that strikes me as being of much wider interest is that the
gnome project always has been motivated by a vision of usability and ease of
use, naturalness in method.  They really worked at that.  So something very
interesting has happened when the result of trying very hard to deliver that
vision is in fact less usability for a substantial proportion of users.  And
it has happened not only to gnome, but to kde as well.

Peter


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