Posts by JonCCrawford

Systemd hee hee: Jessie Debian gallops (slowly) into view

Re: Two thirds of this review was not so useful

LMDE2 Cinnamon isn't using SystemD. Clem has said they'll likely move in the future.

Gnome on Jessie is quite smooth and, I assume, unadulterated. A batch of extensions is installed but they're not enabled. Screen tearing in XFCE here, with Haswell or an Nvidia 750ti and Debian's proprietary driver, still keep me away, sadly.

Mint's current LMDE Cinnamon updates to Jessie very nicely. Did it earlier this week. It's only a few weeks older.

As a desktop user, I want an init system to stay invisible. So far, systemd has been.

Hey Linux newbie: If you've never had a taste, try perfect Petra ... mmm, smells like Mint 16

Cinnamon's Inflexible About Workspaces

Cinnamon doesn't seem to have any way to restore a window to its original workspace. That means of you open App A on Worskpace One, move to Workspace Two, and want to return to App A, clicking on its minimized representation in the panel will open it in the current workspace, moving it from where you want it to remain. (Doable in MATE, XFCE, KDE, Gnome Shell.)

That alone is reason enough to keep me away from Cinnamon, Otherwise, it's spiffy.

I also like to click on URL's in mail, etc., knowing they will open in a browser in another workspace, where I can move at my leisure. Can't do that in Cinnamon.

Meanwhile, the appearance of Mint's versions of MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE and KDE are moving ever close to each other.

I used CentOS for a long time as a desktop until its GTK got so old I couldn't run what I wanted to run.

And, the font rendering never really moved beyond 2010.

CentOS 7? Maybe.

Apple's poisonous Touch silently kills the GNOMEs of Linux Forest

Will Developer Ego Keep Gnome From Changing?

Despite the fears of some, Apple has not transformed OS X into iOS. It's now arguably the most conservative consumer OS.

One obvious instance of iOS intruding into OS X -- Launchpad -- can be happily ignored, unlike Gnome 3's enforced use of the Application Overview, aka Big Stack of Big Icons.

What has happened to Gnome reflects the disproportionate influence of developers in major Linux interface design decisions. That's to be expected, given the nature of the thing. But, the Gnome team's insistence that they have delivered the One True Way, that it is the users who should change, not the developers who are supposed to be fulfilling user wishes, smacks of the "If You Don't Like It Write Your Own Stuff" curse that afflicted so many people for so long. Linux and open source are not playgrounds for developers.

I think making *TWO* change to Gnome 3 would improve its usefulness by an order of magnitude:

One, Trigger the Overview display by moving the mouse cursor either to the right edge of the screen (the Workspace sidebar edge) or to the space on the left screen edge where the dock is hidden. The insistence that I need to push the cursor into one tiny spot in the upper left represents design failure.

Two, allow a way to launch non-Favorited applications, i.e., apps that are not in the dock, that avoids the Application Overview. The App Overview is simply another kind of menu, one that becomes unwieldy very soon. OS X users have easy access to an alphabetized listing of the Applications folder. Gnome should just copy that, and it easily could. Don't replace the App Overview, just, gasp, give people a choice. Managing access to lots of apps via hierarchical menus sucks, but no one had a better idea, including Apple and the Gnome team.

Whether it is those changes or others isn't important. What is important is that the Gnome team recognizes the need to make some changes. Gnome needs users, users don't need Gnome.