GNOME 2 rant ... the sequel
Warning: severe geekishness follows.
About a year and a half ago, I wrote an angry rant about GNOME 2. It was, of course, critically ignored. In the time since, Pat Volkerding, the maintainer of my favourite Linux distribuion, Slackware, famously removed the GNOME packages from Slackware. I'm not a user of slackware-current; I prefer to keep to the stable releases. So I've been using Slackware with no GNOME at all for 41 days, 15 hours and 5 minutes.
On the whole, it's barely affected me. There are two things I miss: Gnumeric and gThumb. That's it. Two applications. Gnumeric is still my favourite spreadsheet programme, since it works and is lightweight. I haven't looked at OpenOffice in a while. It could be that it's gotten lighter and easier on the eyes since version 1.1.0. As for gThumb, I liked it because it had a nice interface for rotating images (this is good for my digital photo collection). I haven't found a suitable replacement, but I imagine there's one out there.
I was going to add that without gnome-control-center I couldn't change the font used in GTK+ applications, but I was able to do so with xfce-setting-show just now. I still don't know how settings in GTK+ work without GNOME around.
Also in the rant, I said that KDE was the only window manager that did what I want. I think I could probably use Xfce now, but I'm really enjoying using Enlightenment 0.17. It's a little buggy, since it's in heavy development, but it's really pretty.
I hardly miss GNOME. It's a good thing that Linux, and Unix in general, are flexible enough to allow all sorts of different applications and desktop environments to be used both interchangeably and concurrently.
posted by Geoff G-T @ 09:33
0 comments
