On Tue, 08 Apr 2014 18:37:06 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> On 08/04/2014 01:55 AM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Mon, 07 Apr 2014 21:53:49 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>>
>>> When we updated all our stuff to OpenSUSE 12.2, we found that it comes
>>> with GNOME 3, which is basically just like GNOME 2, except designed to
>>> only work on a Tablet.
>>
>> Well, no, that wasn't the design goal (as I understand it), but I use
>> GNOME3 daily, and I like its minimalistic approach.
> 
> Heck, in OpenSUSE 13.1, they even took away the scrollbar and replaced
> it with a page-selector widget. The entire design seems focused on
> touchscreens.

I run 13.1 on two machines every day with GNOME3.  I've no idea what 
you're talking about - I've got scrollbars in my newsreader (pan), for 
example, and they work like scrollbars.

>> The only thing I absolutely hate about it is when a plugin dies, it
>> crashes the entire session with an "Oh, no!  Something happened!" and
>> an option to log out.  I would at /least/ like to save documents I have
>> open before being forced to log out.
>>
>> Whoever thought that was a good idea spent far too much time dealing
>> with systems where everything runs in ring 0 and an abend was generally
>> considered a good thing.  We're past those days now, and being able to
>> recover, say, a running virtual machine might just be a /good/ thing.
> 
> I enjoy the way that you can enable and disable "GNOME shell
> extensions". Except that an "extension" is merely some code that patches
> the live JS code that powers the shell. When you disable one, THE
> EXTENSION is responsible for undoing all of its changes. If it does this
> incorrectly, then "disabling" a plugin does not put the system back into
> its original state.

Yep, and you can see the effects of this with some poorly written 
extensions.  The GNOME developers *really* need to harden the error 
handling a bit more.

> Hell, it's trivially possible to write an extension that installs itself
> in the Init() function, and has EMPTY Enable() and Disable() functions!
> In which case, enabling or disabling the extension is no-op.
> 
> People, THIS IS NOT SENSIBLE DESIGN!
> 
> Designing a system that is completely undocumented, yet can only be
> extended by violating encapsulation to monkey-patch live code while it's
> still running is a Bad Idea.
> 
> Designing a system where the plugin author is responsible for enabling
> and disabling correctly is a Bad Idea.
> 
> Designing a system that's powered by an untyped psuedo-OO scripting
> language originally intended for web development rather than desktop
> applications is... questionable at best. :-P
> 
> Utterly failing to document one single shred of this is... exasperating
> in the extremes!
> 
> Still, we found that once we (*cough* I *cough*) spent a few months
> patching the code, we could get it to hobble along more or less how we
> wanted. OTOH, if Win8 doesn't work how you like... suck it?

:)

And the extensions system in GNOME3 has allowed those who preferred GNOME2 
to get some semblance of the functionality they were used to.

I don't really care about the DE myself; GNOME3 is less distracting for 
me than KDE, which is why I use it - I'm more interested in apps and 
getting work done than tweaking my desktop endlessly. ;)

Jim



-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

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