Re: galeon 1.3 yet again, for the last time

On Thu, 2005-03-17 at 17:13 -0500, philip dahlquist wrote:
> really,  these are the things i wanted:
> 
> 1) the -choice- to pick what my buttons looked like, because stock
> gtk/gnome buttons look clunky

Again (I'm pretty sure someone mentioned this), just change your icon
theme.  I don't really like the default Gnome theme either, so I changed
it.

> 2) the -choice- to pick my email client from the preferences panel.  the
> only way to do that now is to access it through gconf. fortunately,
> fedora allows you to do that through an inconspicuously named menu
> choice called "configuration editor".  in order to do that, you have to
> read the extra prefs readme and find it down near the bottom of that doc

Uh, I changed this in the Gnome control center.  I don't really like
Gconf (reminds me too much of the Windows registry), so don't muck
around in there unless you really have to.
> 
> 3) the -choice- of throbber, i thought the thing that launched those
> little orange globes was cool.  now, after reading the help, i find that
> this too can be changed through the previously mentioned configuration
> editor.

Change your icon theme.  If you don't like what a icon theme provides
for an icon theme, you can do a manual override for that theme by
placing a throbber of your choosing in the appropriate path under
~/.icons.  Read more at freedesktop.org.  (If you have trouble, I'll be
glad to help, but it's a bit OT here.)
> 
> i think these last 2 items significantly increase the difficulty rating
> for customizaton, especially when all of this was done inside the
> preferences dialog of the previous version.
> 
> for all the talk about freedom to make linux what you want, if you don't
> like it you can change it, i find myself increasingly forced take things
> as they come.
> 
> i think it is kind of antithetical to the whole philosophy of open
> source when things like this occur.  why assume that i want to use the
> gnome mailer?  there are five different email utilities in the fedora
> internet submenu, and as many web browsers.

Well, the beauty of open source is that you can modify the source and
redistribute it on your own.  More power to ya.

> do you guys feel that there is a trend toward less configurability, 

This is an explicit goal of the Gnome project, because allowing too many
options can just be confusing.  I'm no dummy and I like options, but
using KDE just gives me a headache.

> because i do, and i have felt that way with the redhat offerings
> starting with the 8 series.  i remember that the first linux i bought
> was redhat 6.0, and i didn't know what to expect, up to that point i had
> only used windows products, but i was blown away with redhat 6, and
> subsequently each issue up to rh 7.3, but when rh 8 came out, i took one
> look and thought, well it looks cool, but it isn't very easy to change,
> i mean you basically got stuck with bluecurve.

Red Hat isn't to blame here; I think the decrease of configurability is
happening in Gnome, which RH happens to distribute.

> but, thank you, adam, michael t, christophe, michael m, ben, and andrew
> for your thoughts because the have been education and helpful.
> 
> by the way,  what linux distros do you guys use, and window managers,
> and why?

I'm using Ubuntu Hoary.  I recently switched from Gentoo because it's
much simpler to maintain a working system so I can actually get real
work done.  As for DE, I'm using Xfce 4.2.1 because it's awesome.  (More
specifically, it's fast, its WM is very good, it's GTK+, and I find
their level of configurability to be about right.) 

Andrew



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