Re: [desktop] why kde and gnome's menu situation sucks
On 10/23/2002 12:01 PM, Marek Habersack at grendel@caudium.net wrote:
> Yes, provided that one terminal satisfies all needs, which is not the case
> currently. I use mlterm when I need good localized output without fiddling
> with fonts and multi-gnome-terminal when I want to save space on the desktop
> by using tabs (mgt is much faster than gnome-terminal2 and doesn't have the
> problem with fonts gnome-terminal sometimes exhibits). Also mlterm while
> great isn't configurable easily enough for a newbie... So, it would be a
> hard choice to pick The One And Only(tm) terminal.
>
Yes, it would be a hard choice, but one that I think has to be made for the
purposes of Debian Desktop. (This applies not just to choice of terminal
emulator, but to myriad other GUI preference and configuration chocies.)
And yes, I accept that this "One and Only One" choice will piss some people
off. So be it. Happily, the people who are most likely to get pissed off
are also the ones most likely to be able to reconfigure the default settings
of Debian Desktop to something more to their tastes. Debian Desktop is for
the newbie, who needs some well thought out default configuration choices
made on his/her behalf. It is not intended for the knowledgable Debian
developer/user who can implement his/her own well informed choices - though
it is to be hoped that such users would enjoy and use Debian Desktop as
well.
That said, thanks for the tip on mlterm configuration. Hopefully Debian
Desktop will be able to pre-configure it so that it works really well for
folks without further tweaking.
> I suppose it should be possible and not very hard to create *-settings debs,
> for example:
>
> gnome-standard-settings*.deb
> gnome-desktop-settings*.deb
> kde-standard-settings*.deb
> kde-desktop-settings*.deb
>
> which files would contain the customized settings for what we have now and
> the Desktop Debian variant. It would probably require extending the
> alternatives system to the configuration files, though (or perhaps making
> the config files auto-generated in postinst and removed/backed up/migrated
> in prerm etc.?)
>
Sounds like a good idea to me. I am not sure if it is presently doable, but
we can tackle that at the appropriate time.
> Again, it's not as much a matter of the software in question but rather of
> its configuration files/databases.
>
Exactly.
> The only problem, I guess, would be for
> users switching between the various setting "environments". In the case of
> GNOME it would require creating a utility that would modify the user's gconf
> database (with their consent, of course) the first time the new
> "environment" is started.
>
Yup. I can vaguely foresee a debiandesktop_1.2_i386.deb available for
installation which would take care of dependencies and tweak, with
permission, various config files.
Cheers,
Luke Seubert
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