[OT] A couple of links about Gnome and usability

[Richmond]

On 03/26/2012 08:44 AM, Warren Samples wrote:
> On 03/25/2012 12:38 PM, Richmond wrote:
>> I have spent some time playing around with PearOS,
>> and can honestly say "it sucks";
>
> I installed the latest version, Comice OS 4, and gave it only a quick 
> look. While I don't mind if someone likes it, I wouldn't recommend it 
> to anyone, especially with hopes that it might an easy transition from 
> OS X. Choosing Comice Classic at login, I did have a working dock with 
> icons which included "Finder" so finding my home folder was a cinch. 
> The Dock icon set mysteriously changed at some point and I could not 
> find an obvious way to do that deliberately. Beyond that, the control 
> center made me feel mostly like there was little I could do to take 
> control. The software center seems very easy to "get", though, and 
> that's a big plus. The UI has with good snap, but in the end, a lot of 
> simple basic stuff is not intuitive for the new user. I think even 
> less than most of the more traditional flavored DEs.
>
> I also discovered that my unmodified install is useless with Livecode, 
> which is Pete's interest. There are all kinds of problems with 
> characters in scripts. you can't use "/". Quotes are treated literally 
> as in:
>
> put "something" into tAnything; put tAnything
>
> returns "something" with the quotes. If someone can tell me what's the 
> likely cause, I'd be interested to know :D Even more interested in 
> knowing how to remedy it.
>
> It was only a cursory look. I've never liked the stock OS X Dock and 
> always ran it without 3D, reflections and animations 

PearOS uses CairoDock. I use, whatever the distro, Avant Window 
Navigator; it can be easily configured to present a flat, transparent
dock with no annoying resizing of icons, 3D fluff and so on. I find that 
Avant Window Navigator can closely resemble the Mac OS 10.2
dock - which I much preferred to later versions. Personally I think that 
the Mac Dock is about the best thing about Mac OS, so have made sure
I have had a dock wherever I have worked; even going to far as to have 
one in my Virtual box running Windows XP.

Of course, with XFCE (let's say Xubuntu) one can set the bottom panel to 
behave in almost the same way; without the overhead of having to
install AWN.

> and set it out of the way in the lower left corner, so this was 
> definitely not a positive feature for me, but that's a matter of 
> taste. That said, this distro has some real drawbacks in my opinion. 
> Pete, this is not the best choice. Sorry to have brought it up.
>
> Warren
>

Certainly, with Ubuntu and its spinoffs (currently doing most of my 
stuff with Xubuntu 12.04 beta 1), Livecode generally behaves
itself; although my Dictionary stack does seem to crash the IDE. However 
this may be due to my warped route to Xubuntu; Ubuntu 12.04
with UNITY, mucked about with Cinnamon, mucked about with MATE, mucked 
about with Lubuntu, installed XFCE. Until I pull
myself together and reinstall a "virgin" install of Xubuntu (not likely 
until the April full release) I won't know for certain why this is 
happening.

I have had Livecode doing very nicely with ZevenOS, a sort of kiddified 
Debian; got cheesed-off with the distro as it kept dumping me in 
dependency hell; so I dumped it.

I have always stuck to Debian derivs, so cannot really say anything 
about other types of Linux.