Re: [tlug] GNOME sucks and nautilus is a PITA

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Tue, 14 Dec 2010 10:21:21 -0500
Scott Robbins <scottro@example.com> wrote:

> To paraphrase some of the BSD fan-people, Gentoo, Arch and their ilk (as
> opposed to elk) are for people who love Unix, whereas Fedora and its
> kind are for those who hate Windows.  

<rant>

I wouldn't put it in that generalizing way, but yes, the way linux
goes these days is to dumb everything down to the level where noone
can do anything about any problem that might arise. But i don't actually
blame distros for this bug the gnome and freedesktop.org people.
Nearly all their projects aim to hide complexity behind a nice and
shiny GUI or abstraction, without any possibility to understand what
is going on under the hood (there is no documentation at all, and
the source code is unreadable). Heck, they even claim that the
user should not know what's going on, because the system handles
everything according to the wishes of the user... well, who this
"user" is i wonder, as it is my wish to be able to help my friends
with their linux problems. But i'm more and more unable to do so,
because i have no clue how these GUIs work and where to correct things. Debugging of the basic system components (networking, X11 etc) is still
possible with the old standard tools, but good luck in figuring out how
these settings relate to stuff like dbus or gconf.

Although i agree that computers are way to complex these days,
i think that hiding complexity is the wrong way. Rather the
whole complexity of the system should be exposed and made visible
to the interested user. From there, each subsystem should be simplified
as much as possible so that debugging is possible for even those
who do not fully understand the subsystem in question.

</rant>
				Attila 

-- 
Why does it take years to find the answers to
the questions one should have asked long ago?