Comments on: Desktop effects activation

By: bub

bub — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 16:44:28 +0000

Adam: I am just a lowly user (and developer), but I think I can understand why other distros do their own thing. Just look at yast in current opensuse - it’s like a boeing 747 control panel, there are far too many similarly named widgets and many panels force you to go through a 7 step wizard, when you only need to change a single setting like IP address. I haven’t used Mandriva for quite some time, but it seems to be much simpler. However, I’m sorry to say that but it looks very amateurish in some places, for example when I installed ipw2200 firmware an ugly grey dialog with monospaced text popped up, which cannot be cancelled and gave no progress indication. This kind of dialogs were present in some other parts of configuration as well. I think Ubuntu fares much better in these areas, they seem to consistently use proper spacing, fonts, give progress indicators for tasks which take more time. If they only fixed the ridiculous preferences menu and made a control panel out of it. Fedora also seems quite nice in this regard, but I haven’t used it much lately because Ubuntu seems to be easier to use overall.

By: pirast

pirast — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 10:54:47 +0000

well, its all about merging it to the gnome settings tool.

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:26:33 +0000

You’re proposing that GNOME should have a capplet which allows switching between Metacity and $random_other_WM, or Metacity and Compiz? If the latter, are you proposing that Compiz should become an officially-supported GNOME project?

By: Adam Williamson

Adam Williamson — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:43:58 +0000

And, cough, Mandriva. Who had it before anyone else. In a cross-desktop utility (drak3d). Which was available under GPL. Not, of course, that anyone else bothered to use it. *sigh*

By: Kristian Høgsberg

Kristian Høgsberg — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:03:03 +0000

Yay! Let’s do it.