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Re: GNOME-2 transition: a first complaint



On Mon, Jul 01, 2002 at 03:50:35PM +1000, Jeff Waugh scribbled:
> <quote who="Marek Habersack">
> 
> > It's on _choice_. The beauty of GNOME has always been in the possibility
> > to make choices - unlike with KDE or Windows where you have virtually no
> > choice.
> 
> That's not true. See the abundance of "choice" in KDE 3.0.1 - there are far
> more options, tweaks, settings and preferences than any administrator or
> user would want to become familar with. If you want a hideous amount of
> unnecessary choice, you might want to look at KDE again.
I meant more of a component choice than an option one. Maybe things have
changed with KDE lately, but when I had the last opportunity to try it, one
couldn't really change the window manager (for example) and be satisfied
with the results. With GNOME it worked smoothly - whatever one wants that he
gets. I agree that too many user-tweakable options (at least available by
default) is not the best thing.

> (This particular issue - opaque move/resize - is a tough one. It would be
> inane to suggest that GNOME could/should target users of 486/P1 class
> machines, but we're not always given the luxury of good video cards and X
I just looked at the metacity source - it's interesting that the effects.c
file contains a compile-time setting of whether to use opaque
resizing/moving effect or not and the setting is set to FALSE (with the
comment that the opaque operations generally suck at this time in metacity).
The weird thing is that the option doesn't seem to have the effect - the
Debian metacity still uses opaque moving/resizing - even though it doesn't
modify the source in that respect. I couldn't find a place where that option
is modified on the runtime. Well, I guess I'm off topic again :)

> drivers. My personal take on this is that less demanding methods will make
> their way back into Metacity. But only due to a very serious need, not just
> because random technologists like a lot of esoteric options.)
That's good. My opinion is that options of UI that strongly affect its
appearance (like font anti-aliasing or not, the opaque issue, background,
theme, use sound for events or not, workspace/viewport settings) should be
present in the standard configuration UI - they are little details that make
up for people's preferences as far as using the desktop goes. Fortunately,
GNOME has most of them :)

marek

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