I used KDE for a long time and was perfectly happy with it. The reason I switched to Gnome was simple – I installed Fedora Core 5 and forgot to switch the default Gnome for KDE. I was pleasantly surprised however, Fedora’s Clearlook theme was the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen (on desktops at least…). I found out that Gnome was actually easier to use than KDE, everything was much simpler, more logical and just less cluttered. But that’s just my humble opinion.
There is one thing about Gnome that really bugs me though – oversimplified apps. They’re pretty and shiny, they do the job but have no configuration options. Sometimes the lack of configuration options even renders the app utterly useless. A good example is gnome-screensaver. Notice anything strange about this screenshot? If you look closely, there’s no button for settings. You can’t change an individual screensaver’s settings by right-clicking either. That’s not so bad for screensavers that just display some swirly things on the screen, but for a screensaver such as “Picture folder” it really sucks. You can’t change the picture folder, it allways looks in your ~/Pictures folder. Just drag and drop you’r favourite pics in there. But why can’t the user just choose the darn folder himself? Would it really make the app so complicated?
According to the gnome-screensaver FAQ the missing settings button is actually “a feature”. They claim that they’ve tried a different approach and that “There are advantages for the user. It demands that themes simply work and that the defaults make sense.” Well guess what? The themes don’t work and the defaults simply don’t make sense. A screensaver such as SlideScreen is supposed to grab an image of your desktop and then slide it around the screen. This would be a fun screensaver if it used the desktop, but now it just uses a default image of some kind and there is no way of changing it. The same thing happens with AntSpotlight – instead of crawling on your desktop with a spotlight, the ant just roams on top of a boring default image.
Another oversimplified app is gnome-screenshot (screenshot). It just sucks. You can’t use delay, or choose to select an area of the screen, or select a window, all features which are found in KSnapshot (screenshot). I need not mention printing in gnome. Lets just say that printing works fine for me (maybe that’s because I’m an ‘idiot’? Hmm….).
Overall I feel that Gnome is great, I find the oversimplification in Gnome less of a problem than the overKomplication in KDE. But that’s just me.
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I had literally thousands of pictures all stored in /storage/pictures and I really wanted them to show up in my screensaver but there was no way I could move them all to ~./Pictures so I got round it by typing this in a terminal (from my home directory):
ln -s /storage/pictures/ Pictures
Worked a treat!
gnome-screensaver was designed, it appears, with two notions in mind:
1. Having a standard way for apps to stop the screensaver from running… reasonable, but of course that means apps have to all add code to say “oh, is this GNOME? do this this way, otherwise do this the old way”
2. The screensaver as nanny state–this isn’t the “GNOME knows what you should have better than you do” that is often complained about, but this is “gnome-screensaver considers you, the user, to be the enemy, and thus you shouldn’t be allowed to configure anything.” The fear, as stated in the gnome-screensaver FAQ, is that the user will make GLtext display “%#@#$%!” or some derogatory remark, or a screensaver may display someone’s pr0n collection if the user is allowed to configure it. Never mind that one can still turn the screensaver off and then just leave up a web page with offensive content, or an OpenOffice window with “!@#!@#%!” in 288-point Vera Sans Bold Italic.
Strangely enough, as things stand, one can’t even choose which of the Politically Correct screensavers should be in the pot for random selection if you ask for a random screensaver (one of the few things gnome-screensaver deigns to let you ask for). One has to give the developer credit, because that issue is under consideration.
Brilliant page!, brother