Date: 15/2/2004
| I recently had a Scribe-Linux user mail me about some problem they were experiencing running Scribe with Gnome. So I thought to myself "I should run Gnome for a while and see if I can reproduce these issues and fix them".
Well I'm back in KDE land now less than 24 hours later and now I remember exactly why I use KDE and not Gnome. To a point, Gnome sucks. It sucks so badly that I'm quite surprised that anyone actually uses it. I'm using the Gnome that ships with RedHat9, which one would assume is reasonably recent. Lets see:
- The file selector is a crime against usability.
- The notification area applet can't stay up for 2 minutes without crashing, and now is permanently dead on my machine.
- Strange little daemons popup crash messages when I boot Gnome.
- Lots of the perferences can't remember there settings for more than a few minutes. e.g. the animiate minimize setting.
- Some of the pref apps don't even load, or take 30 seconds to show up. So long that I had assumed that they had crashed.
- Crashes are so common with Gnome that I began to expect things to break, instead of expecting them to work. When things crash they just never appear, no crash dialog or notificatin that they died... they just disappear silently.
- Windows don't dock on the edge of screen. Although there is probably an option hidden somewhere to make it do that, although I doubt the pref app would actually work.
- The file association editor is craptacular. Amongst other things you can't seem to set the default application associated with a file type... I gave up after 10 minutes of trying.
- It for some bizarre reason uses ~/.gnome-desktop as the desktop folder instead of ~/Desktop. What were they thinking?
- On the first few boots into Gnome the file manager took ages to display the desktop. It just showed a flat colour rectangle, no background, no icons and no right click menu. Then some minutes later something timed out and the wall paper appeared. Then a little while later some icons showed up. Riiiiight.
- Gtk? Oh please, it's horrible. Compared the average windows application it's a barf fest. Whats with the massive waste of screen real estate? Huge icons? 10px borders on everything? Guys guys guys, thats no way to write a widget set.
- Woe to any application that tries to explicitly place windows on the screen, Gnome gets all stropy and moves the window half off screen in a little fit of temper, completely ignoring the hints the application gave it. It's like trying to do business with a 2 year old!
I'm sure somewhere in the world the little Gnomers are hacking away at their c code. But please stop! Go and help a real desktop!
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