GNOME Classic & Extensions

[Tim]

On Sun, 2013-09-15 at 10:32 -0400, Jorge Fábregas wrote:
> Hey Tim, since you've been here on the list for years, I'm wondering:
> What DE are you running? Did you move to  GNOME Shell?

I do not like the 3.0 desktop, I find the way it expects us to use it
annoying, tedious, and unergonomic.  None of my computers are iPads.
So, on Fedora and Ubuntu, I have played around with two or three methods
of making it behave like 2.0 (and I do not recall which method I used
with each).  I tried to install Mate on Fedora, but Fedora 17 only had
it in a testing repo, if I recall correctly, and I didn't want to open
that can of worms.  So, it's probably simply just the fallback option.

I want the traditional, organised, menus.  Not screens of icons.  I want
the traditional windows and workspace switchers.  I want the taskbar,
and I want applications to use their own taskbar at the top of their own
window, and not behave like a Mac with top taskbar that keeps changing
between desktop taskbar and different application taskbars.

However, making 3.0 look like 2.0 doesn't get around a nasty problem or
two.  3.0 is much more CPU intensive, and I seriously doubt that I could
even get it to run on some of my older PCs.  I also get that annoying "a
problem has occurred" pop-up error message each time I log on, with no
clue about *what* damn error it is, and things seem to work fine,
anyway, whatever that error was.

I avoid KDE, because I don't like it.  Old Gnome's defaults were
reasonably good, I have to configure the wazoo out KDE to make it
tolerable.  I don't want to do that umpteen times across several
computers, and I still don't like it's Fisherprice/WindowsXP look, it's
messy menus, and the plethora of hideously K-named applications.

I have tried, at various times, other desktops, but keep coming back to
Gnome 2.0 as the way that I wanted it to be like, and an imitation was
always half-arsed compared to using the actual thing.  Several of the
lighter desktops were seriously lacking in things that I found really
annoying.  Such as how removable media mounting/demounting was
cumbersome, and less automated.  And things like pulseaudio being a
pain, rather than something that just worked.  Plus various applications
that I wanted to use were Gnome, so using another desktop wouldn't get
around the heavy Gnome baggage.

I have to seriously wonder what goes through the minds of designers.  If
you asked them to come up with a modern teacup, the handle would be on
the inside, it wouldn't stand upright, you'd need to buy new teaspoons,
and replace your dining table.

As you can see, I am slightly against it.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
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