The two latests updates on Gnome that I have suffered have greatly reminded me of the famous Linus quote
"This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do."
And I also remember him switching to Gnome when KDE 4.0 hit the fan. I was more than tempted to switch to Windows 7 after my first install of F 15 and having tried KDE with F 14. I was so disgusted with both "UI"s that I switched to MAC at home but couldn't at work as it is not supported on the hardware that is blessed by those who know. better. I griped with F 14 Gnome and finally grew into it. At home I found that Mac OS X gui was a bit better on some tasks and sucked more in some other tasks.
After initiial installation nothing worked at work with F 15 as I expected but the lure of first working ALT+TAB switcher finally won me over. Of course this involved a lot google-fu to fix things that really annoyed me:
- Desktop should have Icons. How to do this is blogged over and over again. One quite short version of the instructions can be found here.
- If you have two monitors you probably want workspaces on the other screen as well. Again gconf-editor to the rescue. Instructions can be found here
- Custom launchers. It seems that you can use Alacarte to create the launchers. Unfortunately Alacarte creates the desktop files without Categories and the launchers end up in the "Muut" -section (Others). It seems that you need to conjure the gedit up and add the categories by yourself. Files are located under your home directory in ".local/share/applications" (Note the dot at the beginning of the path). Just add Categoris=Game if your custom app is a game.
- Weather. There was no weather on my taskbar! Now there is with gmone-extension.
Not gnome related annoyances:
- Youtube (in some sense == flash). With my laptop the only way to get it to work was to install gnash-plugin and on my desktop the only way to it to work was to install latest beta from Adobe.
- The lack of the usual stuff after install. This time I referred several sources Fedora setup guides.
- Gnucash. It is shocking to find out that you owe 3k euros instead of having 2k euros on your savings account. And it seems that the error is gradual. It is time to say goodbye forever for this piece of shit as soon as I have time to find better alternative. Meanwhile I will continue to use it on Mac and will not update it. It is truly sad that the history will be gone forever as soon as I bury the mac. I guess it will not be Lion for me for a quite some time.