Joachim\’s GNOME Adventures

See this?

It’s a BUG.

As long as developers are people who live on a different planet to users like myself, Linux and GNOME will never take off.

Someone’s jsut told me that this is a feature.

Please no. It makes any work I do with GNOME a pain. Any time I work with HTML or DocBook, moving lines or blocks of text is a nightmare, as they glue to the next one, and there’s indentation spaces that get mixed in there too.

Can’t non-geeks use GNOME too? Do you guys really not want us around? It would be simpler if people jsut told me to fuck off.

Just to show that I don’t only complain about problems with GNOME and free software, I’ll tell you about about a recent problem with MS Word.

I had a document, let’s say 12 pages long. There was a section break at page 10, because the final two pages needed a different footer. More specifically, they needed their own page numbering.

I wanted to print just the last two pages, so I typed ‘11-12′ into the print dialog’s page range field. Nothing happened: just the little printer animation on the status bar, and then nothing. I tried ‘11,12′. I tried a test page to see my printer hadn’t just died. Still nothing.

Apparently, if you restart the numbering in your headers and footers, Word can no longer print the ‘real’ page number. Even though the status bar tells me I’m looking at page 11, the print dialog doesn’t recognize that number. Nor does it give you an error message about it. That would be too simple!

I opened the same document in OpenOffice.org, hit Print, typed in ‘11-12′, and bingo, there it was coming out of my printer’s tray. Just perfect.

I guess the difference between Free software and non-free (or Microsoft) is that we gripe about Microsoft, but we know we’re powerless to get it fixed. We’re at the mercy of the next version, and who knows what that will bring. With Free software, there is the tantalizing possibility that the coders will listen, and the next version will fix the bug that annoys you. When that doesn’t happen, it’s paradoxically more frustrating than if there’d never been the hope of that at all. Basically, because Free software has so much more potential, its users are starting to demand more of it.