On Jan 24, 2016, at 4:47 AM, John Hodrien J.H.Hodrien@leeds.ac.uk wrote:
You can start applications, move windows around, and manage files. What do people really want from a DE?
Given a choice between Helix GNOME [*] and GNOME 3, I’ll certainly pick Gnome 3.
However, it is also a fact that GNOME has some longstanding design misfeatures that should have been fixed long ago.
Take GNOME Terminal. (Please!)
Its biggest problem is its nonstandard settings mechanism, called Profiles. Every other standard GNOME app puts this under Edit > Preferences, but this one weird oddball app calls it Edit > Current Profile. What are profiles, and why should I care about them? Yes, I know they have a purpose, but forcing the user to operate through this abstraction layer amounts to exposed plumbing.
Compare Terminal on OS X, where essentially the same dialog is available from the standard Preferences menu. OS X’s terminal program also has profiles, but it takes you right to the current default profile, rather than give you two different paths to the same configuration screen.
I wouldn’t even care about this if GNOME Terminal had better defaults. Its 500 line default scrollback limit is a joke in 2016. OS X’s Terminal has a much smarter default: available memory. You can limit it to a fixed number of lines, but you have to go out of your way to do that now.
I ask you, seriously now, when was the last time your system ran out of RAM due to GNOME Terminal?
gedit broken for offering you fonts that aren't monospace? I think that's a really weak criticism, considering it defaults to monospace.
The standard GNOME monospace font is not the only good monospace font in the world.
That said, I wonder if the complainers know how good they have it? I wonder how they’d fare if sent back to the days of xfs, blocky fixed-size pixel fonts, and X font strings?
Buncha spoiled brats not appreciating their antialiased resizable sensibly-named fonts, installed by default and working out of the box. :)