[Nottingham] the demise of gnome-3

[Joshua Lock]

On 2 May 2012 17:13, david at gbenet.com <david at gbenet.com> wrote:

> I have been a Linux user for over 15 years and what I have seen is the
> hard coding and the
> lack of real choice in what end users of Linux can do. Gnome-3 may be
> pretty but tell me how
> do you place important txt documents on your desktop? Or how can you add
> programmes to the
> menu? How can you edit the menu? Not all programmes you install get added
> to the menu - why
> is that?
>

Have you actually tried using a search engine to find the answers to any of
these questions? As I've stated before they are indeed all possible.

It seems you've made up your mind about things, but for the sake of
completeness:

"how do you place important txt documents on your desktop?" - use
gnome-tweak-tool and in the Desktop section toggle "Have file manager
handle the desktop" to On

"how can you add programmes to the menu?" - By menu I assume you mean the
dock-like widget to the left, in which -
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/shell-apps-favorites.html.en
Otherwise, see below.

"How can you edit the menu?" and "Not all programmes you install get added
to the menu - why is that?" - I'm still not 100% certain what you mean by
menu here. Programs in the "Applications" view[2] are anything for which a
.desktop file exists in one of the standard places for such things. I
recently added Eclipse to the Applications view by creating a
eclipse.desktop in ~/.local//share/applications.
How to create .desktop files is well documented[3].


> I can  appreciate that Ubuntu has taken many many steps backwards for the
> sake of wooing
> people from Microsoft - and giving those Microsoft users a "look and feel"
> of Windows with a
> very pretty gnome-3 -  but Ubuntu  is still bollocks and Gnome-3 is still
> bollocks unless of
> course you have been using Windows then Ubuntu must  seem like a breath of
> fresh air.
>

The Ubuntu user interface is Unity, all this time you've been flaming
Gnome3 did you really mean Unity?


> Microsoft is a "hard-coded branded product" which offers no freedom of
> choice. I could say
> the same for Ubuntu and SUSE. Fedora et al. We are fast moving to closed
> hard-coded Linux
> not open source. But for Mr and Mrs Average - what do they care?
>

What I understand the definition of hard-coded to be clearly disagrees with
yours. My understanding of the definition of Open Source most definitely
does.

I take hard coded to mean that one cannot change a certain behaviour
without editing and recompiling the source, the things you have mentioned
above do not fit this meaning.

I subscribe to the standard OSI definition[1] of Open Source by which
Gnome3 and Unity are most certainly open source.

Regards,
Joshua

1. http://www.opensource.org/osd.html
2. http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/shell-apps-open.html.en
3. http://developer.gnome.org/integration-guide/stable/desktop-files.html.en
-- 
Joshua Lock
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