Mon, 12 Nov 2012
Desktop Environment-Specific Apps
I have recently came across this two years old bug report, filled to the bug tracker of Transmission (a Bittorrent client) where a GNOME developer suggests removal of the notification area icon from the application on the basis that GNOME 3 does not support notification area at all.
So if I understand it correctly, we are now living in a world where all the GUI applications have to be dependent on the particular desktop environment, and it should be no longer supported to run - say - Transmission under XFCE, or GIMP under KDE, at least according to GNOME developers. "We GNOMErs do not support notification area icons, so this application should not use it" (even though the application is not used exclusively under GNOME)? Where are the freedesktop.org cross-DE interoperability recommendations?
That said, notification area as such sucks - what I liked most was the original approach of X11: using on-desktop icons for minimized applications (instead of applications and documents shortcuts), and applications displaying their own status in their icon (handled by every window manager using the same ICCCM specification).
3 replies for this story:
Martin Putniorz wrote:
GNOME devs are just a bunch of guys who think of themselves as the team of Steves (Jobs). More about it here https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/
Yenya wrote: Rotting in threes
Yep. I have also discovered that blog post yesterday. Quite disturbing read, isn't it? And it is not only GNOME, but Ubuntu and others as well.
Milan Zamazal wrote:
Interesting reading, it explains a lot. I'm pretty happy and quite stable with simple and highly customizable environments (StumpWM + Emacs + uzbl) last years. The problem is that such environments are not suitable for nonprogrammers. It seems that Xfce is still going in the right direction, i.e. being easy to use, easy to set up and running well on old hardware. So I'm going to replace GNOME and KDE desktops of my users with Xfce on the next upgrade. Other users may have other needs. E.g. one of positive effects of Ubuntu was that some developers and users preferring smaller and unstable distribution with frequent updates and more buzz have left Debian in favor of a somewhat similar distribution better suited to their needs. This is all right and there has been less tension in Debian since then as there are less attacks on its principles -- I think both Debian and Ubuntu users and developers are happier now.