A simple matter of…

I’ve upgraded my Eeeeeeepc to Karmic (yes, it’s early). It seems to have mostly worked fine which is good.

The login screen now has highly visible shutdown buttons etc which is nice. However it also looks horrible (I really liked the jaunty one) and displays my user details (the full name, not username) which I don’t like.

Two more things which annoy me each and every Ubuntu release:

I don’t like nautilus. I think the “desktop metaphor” is horrific – the icons are always going to be underneath the windows you are trying to work in. Each time it seems to be reenabled, each time it’s hunt down where to kill it. This time I’ve had to resort to gconf (aka “you’ve failed any user friendliness testing”). Why on Earth the Gnome developers seem to want to remove every darn config option and then tell people to use gconf just beggars belief.

* apps -> desktop -> gnome -> session -> required_components_list (the key _not_ the folder) – edit this and remove “filemanager”

My second complaint is about the logout/shutdown/lock buttons – again, every release this seems to change – the menu entries, the panel icons, what happens when you press a button. Now I seem to have about three ways to logout (which ask “logout or switch user”) and only one to do the things I actually want to do (lock screen, shutdown, suspend, reboot).

The countdown timer on the shutdown screen now only goes in 10 second increments which I dislike – and they still aren’t watching for XIDLE events as I’ve suggested (this would mean it would only trigger after inactivity).