Craig White writes:
I think his opinion matters as much as anyone else (and I gather that
in
the eyes of Gnome developers, not so much).
You know my feelings as I too am a KDE 4 survivor ;-) To make an omelet,
you have to break some eggs. I think there is a core of long time Linux
users who were upset because their familiar interface changed. Such is
progress.
It's not that stuff has merely changed. It's that the stuff has changed,
major parts of existing functionality were removed without having any
functional replacements, and every time someone points this out, they're
told that they're too stupid to know what's good for them, and this is The
Better Way. There was a very good rant on Slashdot today, about an apparent
army of fired UI "experts" that, apparently, have nothing better to do than
invade existing projects, and remove existing functionality and replace it
with rounded corners and gradient background colors.
In Gnome 2 I had a usable panel widget that showed my sensors CPU
temperature, a small weather widget, and a power management widget that
actually showed the watt-hour capacity of my laptop battery, so I can
observe it degradation, with every passing month.
Gnome 3 came without any kind of a sensors CPU widget. There's one now,
which does not work. I can see why it's broken, it's reading off an internal
hardcoded list of /sys paths, and my kernel creates /sys nodes for its eight
CPU core thermal sensors that the widget doesn't know anything about, so it
just sits there, and tells me I'm running at 0 degrees Celsius. There's
still no weather panel wiget, to my knowledge. At one point I have a dim
recollection that "gnome-power-manager-extras" existed, that added a
comparable watt-hour popup, but right now nothing like it exists, and the
icon just sits there with a single %-age label.
And I won't even get started on the clusterfracas with the desktop icons,
and the evolution of the "have file-manager handle the desktop" option in
tweaktools.