[lug] RH9 okay - GNOME 2 not - my yearly bitch about upgrading.

[Michael J. Hammel]

Note - I'm just blowing off steam into the ether.  Be gentle when you
thrash me with the wet noodles.

I spent a little over a day bringing up RH9 from a fresh install over
RH7.3.  It was pretty straight forward.  I had a minor hickup getting my
network cards properly ordered, but that didn't take long.  The server
side of things is very clean.  Even firewalling went quickly, which was
one of my bigger concerns since I'm not real up to date on dealing with
that bit of configuration.

GNOME 2, on the other hand, has taken days.

In GNOME 1.4 they had "desktop_guide.applet", which was their default
pager.  It's a GNOME applet, not a sawfish one. It was great - multiple
desktops with multiple pages per desktop.  I was able to open my
XNotesPlus application and have XNotes on a single desktop spread across
8 different pages.  

Along comes GNOME 2.  Wave b'bye to "desktop_guide.applet" and say hello
to the braindead "Workspace Switcher".  Not only does it not have
multiple pages per workspace, but I can't spread an applications windows
across workspaces and have them remain there past the current session. 
ARRGGGHHH!!!!  The blows the whole premise of having sticky notes spread
across my virtual screen space.

I've looked at switching window managers to find one with a decent
pager, but none really work right.  FVWM is about as close at you can
get but that's too much work to configure (hard to believe I say that
after having been a die hard FVWM fan for years).  Enlightenment
wouldn't compile - it refused to find FNlib when I installed it under
/usr/local/fnlib.  Even if I could get a different WM working, none of
the pagers embeds in the GNOME panel across the top of my display.  So I
really want - and need - desktop_guide.applet back.  

I rebuilt it from source but it doesn't drop in to the GNOME 2.  I
suppose I could go back to GNOME 1.4, but I'm sure I'm setting myself up
for further heartaches if I don't stay up with the changes.  I could
also try to port it into GNOME 2, but I'm only up on the GTK+ API, not
GNOME.

What sucks it that, as far as I can tell, GNOME dropped
desktop_guide.applet because of lack of developer support, similar to
why they dropped sawfish.  God help us if they lose developer support
for Bonobo.  If you adopt it, you support it.  Don't just blow it off. 
Your users are depending on it.  This wreaks of MS style "user support."

Going beyond this one issue:

1. The default pager doesn't remember its workspace size unless you
manually save the session and then kill the panel (hoping you remembered
to make sure the panel was set to "respawn" in the sessions
configuration).  That took a few hours of google'ing to discover.

2. The background isn't remembered between sessions.  You have to set it
with gconftool-2 as an added program to your session startup.  Thank
you, again, google.

3. GNOME Calendar is gone.  I used it instead of Evolution to manage my
calendar because I could just launch it from the clock in my panel.  No
more.  I have to use Evolution's calendar tool, which - believe it or
not - doesn't have email notification yet!  It's a friggin mail client
for batman's sake!  Note - all the more reason to finish the long-ago
started-but-never-completed calendar support in XNotesPlus.

4. Returning to the workspace issue again, I can no longer open multiple
Galeon windows across multiple workspaces and have them saved between
sessions - subsequent sessions stuff all the galeon windows into a
single workspace.  Thanks, GNOME dudes.  Arrgghh.  What's the point of
having multiple workspaces if I can't use them!

5. My one beef with RH9:  LANG=C.  "Nuff said, since its easy to fix.

I remember I used to think getting a clean, professional interface on
Unix was going to be a good thing and GNOME (and KDE, which fairs no
better for me) was a good idea.  There are times I feel I should have
stuck to startx, FVWM and elm.

This years bitch is brought to you by the perennially unemployed who
sure as hell don't need their software giving them a hard time too....

Okay.  Steam valve closed.  I need a dose of "Everybody Loves
Raymond"....
-- 
Michael J. Hammel                               The Graphics Muse 
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                      http://www.graphics-muse.com
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