[CentOS] Just need to vent

Mon Jan 25 02:37:44 UTC 2016
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On 01/23/2016 06:20 PM, Alice Wonder wrote:
> Sometimes the direction of UI development in gnome really angers me.
>

I'll have to be one who has to say that I really am not bothered by 
GNOME 3.  It is better out of the box than GNOME 2 ever was, at least in 
my opinion, especially that abomination called Nautilus spatial mode.

It is a bit irritating that things are either really easy or nearly 
impossible to do, with very little in the middle that are just a bit 
hard to do when it comes to desktop customization, but, you know, I've 
not been one to make things too custom.  But as far as I'm concerned the 
Trinity DE is where I'm most comfortable (TDE being, of course, a 
continuation of KDE 3.x).  Yes, there are some packages I can install, 
but it hasn't been a major deal for me to make it 'just like what I'm 
used to.'

But no environment is perfect; I've used fvwm, lxde, xfce, cde, Apollo 
DomainOS pads, the UnixPC Office, raw X11 with twm, kde 1,2,3 and 4, and 
gnome 2 and 3; the only modern DE I really don't like is Unity.  But for 
the rest; well, no real strong preferences.  As long as I can start 
applications and lots of terminals and get some basic status stuff from 
my DE I'm pretty happy.  And GNOME 3 is light years ahead of where we 
were back in the Bluecurve days, at least with local displays.  Remote 
is a different ball of wax, at least with GNOME 3.

I use, and am happy with, CentOS 7 on the both desktop and the server, 
especially now that I've rolled out enough servers to get used to the 
way C7 does things.  Multiple NICs and static IPs are not a problem, and 
the new installer makes everything easier to get to, even if some 
things, like setting up RAID and LVM together, are a bit differently set 
up and are done in a different way than before.  Much better than the 
windows-style 'wizard,' reminiscent of InstallShield, of before.

There are of course corner cases, but my requirements thus far have been 
met very well with no real problems.  The new systemctl way took me all 
of five minutes to like better than the 'service'/'chkconfig' pair, and 
so far things seem as stable as C6 on the same hardware.

Yes, it is different, and I know some folks equate 'different' and 
'change' with 'being worse.'  I think different just means different, 
and it is a separate judgment whether something is better or is worse.  
Or just different.

> For example, when selecting a font for the gedit text editor - there 
> is no way to ask it to only show monospace fonts.
>
> It's a fricken text editor, that should be the default - meaning you 
> have to do something special to get fonts shown that aren't monospace.
Why?  Why is it automatic that a text editor should be automatically 
monospace?  (Sure, I use gedit with a monospace font, but that doesn't 
mean it's not useful with a proportional font).

What I want is a knob in Thunderbird to keep the message font from going 
microscopic even though I have set a minimum font..... but that's 
something I need to take up with upstream, since it is CentOS' stated 
goal to be functionally equivalent to upstream EL.

To get a 'use monospace font list only in gedit' you should really talk 
to or file a bug report with upstream.