Fedora 15 and Gnome 3

For the past few months, I've given up any real hacking.  I've weaned myself off of the antidepressants I was taking, and then I found that to retain my sanity I really needed to up the amount of exercise, sunshine, and fresh air I was getting to keep my emotions up.  So I've become quite the exercise fanatic of late: not because I like it, but, because it is necessary.

So, I have not touched any of my software projects for a couple of months.

But, after having read all of the horrible things said about Gnome 3, I wanted to experience the horror myself.  So I wiped the Dell PowerEdge T100 server and put Fedora 15 on it.

Installation was painless, but, it let me know that I didn't have the graphics power to run Gnome 3 in regular mode, so it runs in 'fallback' mode.  Fallback mode is quite nice, but, there are many oddities.

The default wallpaper is some blue stripes, which I did not find very soothing.  Right-clicking on the desktop does nothing, so, to change the wallpaper in fallback mode, you have to select Applications > System Tools > System Setting, select "Background" from the "Personal" section of the dialog, and then choose something else.

My workflow has always been based on leaving my currently active files and folders on the desktop.  My habit is to have my current projects on the desktop and inactive projects are stored in Documents.  Gnome 3's fallback mode does not allow files on the desktop, but, you can enable that feature.  Install and run the gnome-tweak-tool.  In its 'File Manager' section, set "Have file manager handle the desktop" to "On".  I found that trick here.

The next aggravation I found was that if you select a file in a File Manager window and then press the key, nothing happens.  You can right-click and select "Move to Trash".  But, I'd prefer that the key delete a file.  I eventually came across Gnome bug 647048 that says that this was intentional, and that now Ctrl+ is used to move a file to the trash.  I find changes like this to be the most worrisome, because I bounce between multiple operating systems as part of my job.  Certain actions are so fundamental as to be muscle memory and are uniform across my platforms.

I pulled a USB drive without unmounting.  That didn't go well.

Anyway, I don't really use Gnome for anything other than as a window and file manager, so I probably am not really get too deeply into this.

On Desktop Linux

I've used various versions of open source and free operating systems for most of my adult life; but, most of my life is spent looking at a desktop PC running Windows 7.  At home, I have two functioning PCs: (1) a laptop running Windows 7 with an instance of Fedora 14 running in VirtualBox, and (2) a desktop running Fedora 14.

I've seen the future: Fedora 15 with Gnome 3.0.  I haven't even tried Gnome 3.0, but, just by looking at the ridiculous screen shots, I'm filled with seething hatred.  The round corners, the huge title bars that only contain a close button, and the blue stripes are all vile. This is certainly is an irrational, unscientific response.  I will give it a try when 15 is final in a couple of months, though.

I guess I'm just saddened that, yet again, some bit of the software ecosystem that I liked has been turned upside down.  I'm still filled with a seething hatred for the gizmo-laden toolbar of Microsoft Windows and Power Point.  After a year with them, I am still much less productive than I was before. I can understand their thinking, I guess.  They see that the future is moving to iPhone-style interactions, and they want a Desktop that can be iPhone-ized or something.

I also feel somewhat sad about the odd bloatware that Guile has become.  I liked Guile 1.8 a lot, but, 2.0 isn't really very fun for me.  It's the debugging that kills me.  There is never any good way to extract the information I need.  The stack and backtrace is always so devoid of useful information.  You can't really single-step in any meaningful way.  It has the same feel as trying to debug C compiled with -O3.

But, I *am* an old man now.  Get off my lawn.  Do I even need to move on to Gnome 3.0?

The truth is that despite using Fedora 14 with Gnome 2.x for almost all of my Linux devel, I don't think I use much Gnome functionality.  There are tons of Gnome programs, but, I don't use any of them.  The whole list of Gnome functionality I use is

• Network manager
• File manager
• Terminal
• System monitor
• PDF viewer
• Image viewer

The non-Gnome functionality I use is

• Emacs
• The development stack: gcc, guile, autotools, etc.
• Fedora / Adobe Flash

And that's kind of it.  If I'm being honest with myself, I don't use Fedora or Linux for anything of value.  I just play with it.  It has become my golf.  I use Linux to play at development, and I develop out of habit for no useful purpose.

The software work that pays me money involves me using

• C#.NET for Windows 7
• MS Office: Word, PowerPoint, Outlook
• VxWorks

And none of this really can be done on Linux.  (Yeah yeah, Mono, Open Office.  They just don't work well enough.)

My social life is all

• Yahoo Mail
• Facebook

I don't use any non-web app for my social computing.  I don't use Pidgin or whatever.