Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops

Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops

Posted Jan 12, 2012 16:50 UTC (Thu) by(subscriber, #33846)In reply to: Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops by dgmParent article: Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops

> How many of those things make sense in retrospect?



About half. Gnome did end up dropping spatial nautilus, switching to a single-window control center, adopting a policy clarifying the difference between Name and GenericName in .desktop files, deprecating bonobo and libgnome and moving their functionality to gtk+, putting together a UI design team after concluding that leaving design decisions up to individual C coders results in ugly applications, and transitioning from gecko to khtml-derived webkit for html rendering (but sticking with mozilla's mozjs/spidermonkey as the main javascript vm).

On the other hand, users got used to the new default button order and inconsistency issues were quickly solved at the toolkit level; today, gnome is a heavy user of non-C languages like python, vala, and javascript, and most people agree that it's a good thing; instead of esound, gnome now depends on the even heavier and more controversial pulseaudio; gconf was replaced with the even more registry-like gsettings (using binary files for the default storage backend); and gnome's insidious influence reaches ever further up and down the desktop linux stack, and although this meets with some grumbling, there is realistically no alternative if one wants to be competitive with proprietary operating systems on the desktop. And of course, Akcaagac's proposal to use PDF—slow-to-render, paginated, optimized for printing on dead trees—as the default documentation format was, quite bluntly, insane.