Re: going from XFCE to Gnome?

["Michael M. Moore" <michael@writemoore.net>]

On Mon, 2007-10-29 at 10:50 -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 27, 2007 at 03:24:28AM -0700, Michael M. wrote:
> > On Sat, 2007-10-20 at 21:12 +0200, Florian Kulzer wrote:
> > > As far as the fam vs. gamin problem is concerned,
> > > aptitude figured out the correct course of action all by itself. It
> > > proposed to ignore the recommendation of fam by these two packages and
> > > to leave fam uninstalled, thus keeping gamin intact on your system, for
> > > both XFCE and Gnome to use. All you had to do was to accept the proposed
> > > solution.
> > > 
> > > Running aptitude --without-recommends sidestepped the problem, but now
> > > you might be missing some Gnome features which are implemented by other
> > > recommended packages.
> > 
> > 
> > I found a few problems on my system (Lenny/testing) after I replaced fam
> > with gamin:
> > 
> > 1)  Menus in OO.org took many seconds to open -- at least 15, perhaps
> > 20.  This was extremely irritating and made OO.org a pain to use.
> 
> do you perhaps have the openoffice.org-gnome package installed? that
> integrates with GnomeVFS and other stuff. You may want to try adding
> or removing that package to see if that makes a difference. 


I did have it installed, then tried removing it.  It didn't make any
difference.  Still, a good suggestion!


> > 2)  The GNOME trash applet no longer updated to show when there were
> > items in the trash.  I could no longer empty the trash from the panel.
> > Not such a big deal, but I typically have most windows on most desktops
> > maximized so I don't usually make use of any icons on the desktop.  So I
> > found it convenient to empty the trash from the panel.
> > 
> > 3)  Nautilus was considerably slower to respond to any attempts to open
> > a new window.  The problem wasn't as severe as the problem with OO.org
> > 
> > Restoring fam and removing gamin put things back to normal. 
> 
> just out of curiosity, what other packages got pulled in/out as a
> result of this? 


Exaile was the only thing I had installed that required gamin, so I
(temporarily) removed that when I removed gamin.  Removing fam didn't
cause anything I can remember to be removed, but dpkg showed warnings
about a couple of packages requiring fam.


> > But the
> > reason I installed gamin in the first place is that exaile requires it,
> > so in the end I decided to remove a lot of GNOME and am using Openbox
> > instead.  OO.org works fine with gamin, as long as you aren't using it
> > under GNOME.  If you use it under GNOME, it appears you need fam, or
> > will face some major irritation.  I still use the GNOME panel, mainly
> > because I love Tomboy and find a few other features of that panel
> > appealing, but I no longer use the Trash applet nor the trash bin at
> > all.  I'm no longer using Nautilus, though it is still installed.  I can
> > get by pretty well with mc and the command line.
> > 
> > So much for Linux "just working."  When they tell you Linux is "about
> > choice," they often forget to mention that you'll find your choices
> > restricted by packages and apps that do not play as well together as
> > they are supposed to.  GNOME is a really nice DE, but I am sick and
> > tired of my choices being restricted by using it.
> >
> 
> I understand you are frustrated. FWIW, I found things "just work" much
> better if you get out of the main DE's. They force lots of stuff on
> you in order to set up their environments, but as a result the
> possibilities of conflicting are much higher... 


Yep, that's the problem with the DE's.  You either accept the GNOME/KDE
ways of doing things or you probably run into some incompatibilities
somewhere down the line when you try to use other things.  It's been
awhile since I last tried KDE, but GNOME at least has improved
considerably over the past several versions in working better with
software not developed with GNOME in mind.  It's still not all the way
there, at least not the way Debian packages it.


-- 
Michael M. ++ Portland, OR ++ USA
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions
of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to
dream." --S. Jackson