A simple matter of…

I’ve been a keen Linux user for just shy of fifteen years now and there have been many, many changes, but I’m just going to look at the “desktop” side and see how things have changed (or not).

“Out of the box” - this has drastically improved. Sound normally works now and general hardware support is leaps and bounds ahead of where we were - 90-95% of the time you can boot an Ubuntu Live CD and things will work. I do think there is quite a bit of work left to be done - I’ve seen widescreen laptop displays not setup properly only a year or so ago. Dual head displays (particularly connect/disconnect) and other “details” such as graphics card assisted video acceleration (required for HD) is still not there, however we aren’t far off, the pieces are now mostly there (i.e. video drivers actually support this, the bleeding edge versions of playback software have the glue code).

Hotplug is done nicely (often far faster and nicer than windows) - plug a printer, camera, mouse etc in and hey presto “what do you want to do?”

Suspend/resume - getting there, but still a bit dodgy IMO (nvidia graphics drivers to blame I believe). Hibernation is in a far worse state.

Desktop. This is my bone of contention. I don’t use KDE much (although I often prefer the applications) as traditionally I’ve not liked the look and feel. I have a deep hatred for Gnome and I think I should expand on this - there are reasons behind it.

For about 10 years I used FVWM2 - my desktop looked something like this. It was very quick (left click on the background, let go and an Xterm appeared). It was tweaked just how I wanted it.

Gnome was slow, buggy but eventually become usable. I decided I liked gnome-panel so for a number of years I ran fvwm2 and gnome-panel - this wasn’t too bad. The panel ate precious little screen estate, however it ate substantially more memory and I suffered from frequent utterances of “WTF isn’t that applet there?

Eventually it became clear that in this new brave world FVWM2 just couldn’t cut it - it didn’t support the new shiny desktop protocols that were required so I cut over to Gnome (metacity display manager).

Things I like:

• metacity is pretty good - it’s stable (bar occasional bad apps grabbing mouse focus and then losing the plot) and fast
• gnome-multi-terminal - tabbed xterms - yay! I do 80% of my work in Xterms (and 19% in Firefox)
• looks pretty

Things I dislike:

• customisation - very little. In fact over time Gnome seems to remove more and more tweaks (more below)
• bloated apps - I run 64-bit. pidgin has currently allocated 750MB of memory (35MB resident), gnome-panel 330MB (17MB resident), banshee 765MB (90MB resident). Good grief!
• buggy apps - this has become worse and worse over the years, it used to be the case I hardly ever saw a crash, now it’s fairly common for me to ditch an application as it’s so buggy.
• on a similar note, dear developers - have you not seen .xsession-errors? This captures all the error messages spat out by your broken app - it’s embarrassing.
• a seeming lack of long-term planning leading to incompatible and broken applications.
• I want one decent application, not ten half decent ones.

Expanding on a few of these points, firstly customisation. One of the great applications released for the Hero phone is Locale. With Locale you can say “when I’m at home, turn the ringer volume up”, “between 11pm and 7am, turn vibrate off and the ringer off”. Fabulous. I know many people laugh that on some cars you can set how long the interior lights stay on after you switch the engine off. Why is this a bad thing? If you become lost in a maze of menus then I wholeheartedly agree that it’s poor design. However if it takes me 20 seconds to walk to the garage door and the default time is 15 seconds I’d love to change it to 25 - I would expect to have to “drill down” quite some way, but that’s fine - it’s a one off change to make my life easier.

Gnome’s way of handling customisation seems to be “remove it”. So you can’t tweak any features of the application. I’m an advanced computer user, it’s rare that I don’t tick “advanced” on a menu. Point this out to Gnome developers and the usual answer seems to be “oh use gconf”. So in the “interest of simplicity” I have to use the godawful gconf tool, figure out which setting to change.

Nautilus. I really, really hate the “desktop metaphor”. Watching people work, then hit “show desktop”, see their work hide, then wait whilst they hunt around on a desktop covered with icons for a file is laughable. So _stop starting it all the time_. It seems that each update I have to figure out the new way to stop it starting. I’ll give the netbook remix people a huge pat on the back here - they’ve made netbooks much, much more useable. We’ll see what Gnome 3 does here, some bits look interesting, however others make me want to take their heads and bang them on the desk.

Moving onto the “lack of long term plan” and “ten half decent applications”, let us look at music players. Of course the fact that half won’t use pulseaudio is why I’ve had to change (before that esd, before that alsa, then oss).

• amarok - v1 was almost perfect, v2 is apparently getting back to there finally
• banshee - buggy (wouldn’t terminate, now won’t show icon), lyric plugin (fail), no wiki, playlist seems immensely hard to control cf amarok
• rhythmbox - fugly interface I can’t use - yes, listing 8 songs out of the 1000’s is dreadful. In fact this is the only program I couldn’t figure out how to import files since import files/folder fails “this folder exists” - yes, I know - it’s the folder I’m trying to import numbnut!
• songbird - was so buggy and slow last time I used it
• exaile - new one so I’ve not used it much but it looks promising (buglist is a bit horrific mind)
  • nope. it crashes whilst scanning my collection: exaile[31201]: segfault at ffffffffd6b8bb90 ip 00007f1df879bb41 sp 00007f1de1902e50 error 4 in libc-2.10.1.so[7f1df8736000+14a000]

Gnome seems to change which application they want you to use for a given task every single release - each one with one shiny new feature and lacking five features from the old version. This is typically explained by “oh, well it’s new” (so wait until it’s _ready_) or that it’s a good thing that the feature isn’t there. I’d like to use the scroll wheel in evince please - it’s a _bug_ not a “feature” that it doesn’t work. _I’m_ the user here, if I want it to work then it should work. (Update: looks like after 4 years they now agree).

Following the interface hall of shame technique we could use one application to show FAIL in spectacular fashion - using Evolution as our poster child. Never before have I used a program which was so buggy, slow and prone to breakage of all sorts whilst failing to link to systems that it claimed to have support for. I _do_ know people who have used it successfully, however when I have “offline mode” enabled on _all_ folders and evolution (since it’s moved location a few times) is using almost a GB of disk space to offline my 200MB of email I’m not very impressed. Particularly when I click on an email and it either a) hangs or b) says it is unavailable. Arrrrghhghghgh!

Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks that the plot has been lost - Keith Packard of X-Windows fame has just written an email client - notmuch. That’s pretty desperate, but I really like the way it works, fast, tagged email. For years I’ve wondered why we have “inbox” and “sentmail” - normally I want to see the whole thread - both sides at the same time, maybe that could be done too.