Re: From KDE to GNOME. Experiences, suggestions and comments

On Sat, 2006-04-15 at 21:09 +0300, Janne Ojaniemi wrote:
Regarding the features: I could REALLY like GNOME to have similar
"network-agnosticsm" as KDE has. Meaning: remote files and folders could
be worked on just like they were on the local machine. An example: I
have some photos on a remote FTP-server, and I wanted to import them to
F-Spot. Now, there just is NO way for F-Spot to directly import those
photos from the FTP-server. I tried adding a connection beforehand to
the server, but F-Spot would still not work with it. On KDE it would
have not made any difference where those files would be. I could have
imported them straight from the server. To the app, it makes no
difference that are those files in the local-machine or in a remote
server. In GNOME I had to first download the pics to the local machine,
and import them from there. All in all, it was a hassle, and there was
no reason for it to be so difficult.

GNOME does have the infrastructure for this, and in
fact many applications make use of it. But for some
reason, applications don't seem to have as widespread
adoption as in KDE.

I disabled the scheme where mounted devices (USB memory-sticks and CD's
for example) are shown in the desktop (I like my desktop clean). And it
works well. But that makes unmounting those devices very difficult. The
device is shown in "Places", but there is no way to unmount the device
from there. Nautilus is also opened by default when I plug the device
in, and it shows the contents of the device. But there is no direct way
to unmount the device from there either. How can I unmount it then? I
need to go to the "Computer", right-click on the device there, and
select "unmount volume". How about making it possible to unmount volumes
straight from "places" and Nautilus's sidebar?

I think Apple's Finder has a neat way of doing this:

http://caminol10n.mozdev.org/appleglot-how-to/finder-glot-environment.png

Note the little eject buttons next to unmountable
media.

OK, I just noticed a strange thing... if I have "Places" on the Nautilus
sidebar, I can't unmount the device from there. But if I change it to
"Tree", I can then right-click on the device and unmount it. Why the
difference?

Different code paths, and somebody wasn't looking
closely enough at the differences. If you file a
bug against Nautilus, I'm sure they'll add Eject
to the context menu in Places.

Regarding window-management.... There is one feature from KDE that I
REALLY miss in GNOME: Window-specific settings. Those made things so
much easier. In KDE I could have certain windows open automatically in
certain workspaces, making effective use of workspaces really easy. I
haven't found a way to do that in GNOME yet, which means that when I
want to have certain app in certain workspace, I either have to go to
that workspace before I launch the app, or I have to launch the app, and
automatically move it to the correct workspace. All that could be
automated in KDE. I could also use the window-specific setting to
automatically hide windows. When my GNOME-desktop loads, it
automatically loads GAIM, and it displays a window. I then have to
manually close that window. In KDE, I could simply tell it to not show
the window, reducing he amount of needed window-management.

You want Devil's Pie. You really do. :)

Also, if the user rolled the mouse-wheel over the desktop in KDE, it
automatically switches the workspace. I haven't found similar feature in
GNOME yet.

This feature has been rejected many times. It's
not very discoverable, and it's very disruptive
if you do it by accident. And it's very easy to
do by accident. You can, by the way, scroll the
mouse wheel over the workspace switcher, rather
than targetting a single little square.

One more thing: Cut & Paste. Is it just me, or does the UNIX-style
select & copy work weird in GNOME? If I select a block of text, unselect
it, and click middle mouse-button in some other app (for example, when
copying text from Gedit to Evolution compose-window), it does not copy
the text. I have to leave the text selected in order for middle-button
copying to work. Is there a way to REALLY make the system copy the text
to clipboard the moment it's selected? OK, I just tried copying
addresses from one text-field to another in Evolution, and middle
mouse-button copying would NOT work. Is there any way to make this work?
Please? Or is this a distro-problem?

Primary selection is not the clipboard. It is
entirely seperate. The clipboard is what you
get with an explicit copy command. I'm very
pedantic about this becuase there's a lot of
confusion out there.

The handling of primary selection is done by
GTK+, which has a very strict interpretation
of the standard (much to my chagrin). By the
standard, primary selection means the thing
that is *currently* selected.

I, and quite a few other people, favor doing
something a bit different: Make the primary
selection be the thing that was most recently
selected. This has two advantages:

1) You can do what you're asking to do.
2) We would no longer have to deselect text in
one application just because text was selected
in another.

Now, when you read my text, you might think that I have lots of
complaints. But that's natural, since I used another system for years,
and I came to appreciate it's features. And when I move to a system that
does not have them, the complaining starts :). But I DO like GNOME, and
I will probably stick around using it. But if some future version of
GNOME would have those pet-features of mine, I would be one happy
camper :).

Criticism is healthy. It helps us grow. :)

--
Shaun


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