Yenya's World

GNOME-Only Applications

Thu, 28 May 2015 14:09:00 +0100

Once upon a time, there was a windowing system called X. There were lots of applications for X written using various widget toolkits. In order to make the window operations unified across the whole desktop, regardless of the widget toolkit used by a particular application, the special application, called "window manager" provided window title bars and borders. Applications could inform the window manager about their particular needs (for example, their minimum required window size, etc.) using an open protocol called ICCCM. Not anymore.

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Multiseat LightDM

Fri, 19 Dec 2014 23:43:00 +0100

After getting a new mainboard, I have upgraded my home computer to Fedora 20, and made my multiseat setup use the udev/logind/loginctl seat tags. About a month ago I have discovered that the seat numbers are not correctly assigned to sessions by xdm(8), so I started to look for solutions. Of course, that piece of crap called gdm was not even been considered for obvious reasons. Apparently the solution does exist, and suprisingly enough, it is really nice: it is called LightDM.

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Politically Correct Media Players

Mon, 09 Jun 2014 11:38:00 +0100

Hello, welcome to today's issue of your favourite "Bashing the Questionable Fedora Desktop Decisions" series. Today, we will have a look at the politically correct media players.

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File Manager

Fri, 24 May 2013 16:57:00 +0100

The last file manager I have used was Norton Commander back in the DOS era. Many years after that, during the flame wars between proponents of spatial and single-windowed Nautilus, I have only laughed at them, thinking that the command line was much better. Why would anybody need a GUI file manager? I feel slightly ashamed now, but I have to admit that for the last two weeks, I have also been using a GUI file manager.

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Desktop Environment-Specific Apps

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 17:43:00 +0100

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.

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Lost GUI features

Mon, 23 May 2011 14:30:00 +0100

Contemporary GUI applications have several problems which, if I remember correctly, previous systems did not have. I wonder whether somebody else also considers it being a problem:

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GNOME 3

Fri, 20 May 2011 19:45:00 +0100

After installing Fedora 15 in a virtual machine, I have decided to give GNOME 3 a try. Firstly, it is really slow over VNC. While GNOME 2 has been pretty usable for testing various new applications in a virtual machine, under GNOME 3 it is almost impossible. Here is a screenshot on which I will demonstrate my problems with GNOME 3:

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XFCE

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 18:09:00 +0100

The first alternative to GNOME I have decided to try is XFCE. In the LWN discussion, Jon Masters presented it as a viable replacement to GNOME. Also, it uses GTK+ like GNOME, so many applications can be the same (including, I have hoped, my window manager of choice, Sawfish. XFCE is definitely usable and configurable for power-user. Most (but not all) properties can also be set using their Settings manager, and thus XFCE should also be mostly usable for ordinary users. So far the problems include:

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GNOME in the Shell

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 23:50:00 +0100

Yesterday, after reading The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience article at LWN, I have decided it is time to at least make an attempt to move away from GNOME, which (much like KDE 4) decided to use revolutionary instead of evolutionary development, and apparently continues in their feature removal crusade in the name of so called usability. Also, this might be a good chance to move away from Galeon after so many years.

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The GDM Fiasco

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:47:00 +0100

A short trip to the history: for GNOME 2.22 (two years ago, in the Fedora 9 timeframe) someone decided that it would be nice to completely rewrite the GNOME display manager. So far so good, but they have decided to include this partially rewritten piece of crap without many important features (a display manager without XDMCP, WTF?) to the official GNOME and thus Fedora releases.

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Is Ekiga Doomed?

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:47:00 +0100

I am more-or-less happy user of ekiga. However, with the latest GNOME release (or two), I am not sure about its future. The new GNOME contains a new instant messaging and voice-over-IP application, Empathy.

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Firefox File Input

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:04:00 +0100

The daily user-interface annoyance award herby goes to the Firefox (or rather XULRunner, which means this is present also in Galeon). The problem is in forms in the <input type="file"> fields. It looks like this:

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Browsers: Back to Square One

Wed, 28 May 2008 18:36:00 +0100

On Oct 15, 2005 i wrote about Galeon development slowing down, and I speculated that I would have needed to choose a new browser. With recent problems of Galeon in Fedora 9, I have decided to look at the current state of browsers again.

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Ekiga, PulseAudio, and D-Bus

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:34:00 +0100

It seems that more and more applications start using D-Bus for communication, so it is time to get ones feet wet with the D-Bus programming. Fedora 8 has PulseAudio enabled by default, which conflicts with Ekiga because of this ALSA bug (see also the related PulseAudio issue).

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XRandR

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 18:46:00 +0100

I have installed Fedora 8 on my workstation. Everything works as expected, except the multihead support. I am getting the "Requested Entity already in use!" error message. The problem is that my xorg.conf uses two separate screens, instead of one screen merged by XRandR extension (which is apparently the preferred way of doing dual-head now).

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