Monthly Archives: February 2010

Gnome hates icons

FAIL, linux, technology, ubuntu


I originally posted this to the gnome-list mailing list in the hopes of reaching
some type of authoritative response.
So far there has been no response from anyone close to the developers in question.

This “bug” was brought to my attention when I recently tried out Ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2 to see what new improvements Ubuntu and Gnome in general had. Upon going through my usual routine of setting preferences to my liking, I could not find the option to put back the menu icons in the 3 main menu’s provided by Gnome in the top panel. Only some of the icons
are shown, others are not. There used to be a setting to bring them all back. This was previously just an annoyance to have to complete the look
of the menu’s.

I went to #ubuntu+1 on Freenode and asked if this lack of preference was just a temporary setback in the alpha developemnt of Ubuntu. I was
pointed to this “bug”:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=592756

Reading the first comment:

“Discussed many times. We should remove the interface tab. Basically
everthing there is a user experience design cop-out. It only belongs in
a tweak UI tool – – but only if someone cares enough to write one.”

“Discussed many times”
Discussed where? Were Gnome users asked for feedback on this decision?

“It only belongs in a tweak UI tool – but only if someone cares enough to write one.”
User experience preferences for gnome should now be the responsibility of third party developers who might or might not develop tools to put
back user experience preferences which gnome developers created and then removed in the first place?

The rest of the comments in “bug” are people disagreeing with the original developer in his decision to remove the preference competely.
Save for 1 developer who agree’d and implemented the descision stating “majority of users”. What majority of users? So far I’m seeing most
people disagreeing with the descision. Not to mention, I don’t see the majority of users requesting preferences be removed regardless if they
are of interest to them or not. Why this descision? Is this preference really that much of a bane on the system resources? Why are we removing
half the icons from the menu’s making them looked half finished and unpolished? Why not remove all icons and be done with it?

I voiced my opinion in the comments of this bug just like the “majority of users” were doing. My comment and one other was removed and my
account on bugzilla disabled.

So, where does a user go to voice his opinions on this type of developer decision where said developers will read it and hopefully impact the
descision? Where can a user submit feedback on bringing back a preference that was removed?

Can we please get this preference put back? I don’t care where it is, but we shouldn’t have to wait for a third party tool to reimplement
preferences to finish the look of the menu’s that have already existed but were removed.

First Post!

Personal, , , , ,

Ok, lets try this again. Apparently Google Chrome has a recent bug in it which crashes when trying to post to wordpress. Had to revert to good ole Firefox.

Anyway, where to start….

I’ve never thought of myself as someone with a lot to say. At least not on a personal blog. Twitter has always met me needs to post quick updates or thoughts. Or so I thought. Apparently I sometimes do have a lot to say about some subjects on occassion and it’s been pointed out to me a few times by different people to post them to a blog. So I guess here it is. The layout needs work and I need to do some research on typical plugins and protection for it. Any advice here is welcome. I’ll try to categorize posts based on topics so people aggragating won’t get garbage like this first post. I think for the most part i’ll be writing about Ubuntu, it’s community, Linux and OSS in general. There will be a good portion of rants since that’s mostly when I have a lot to say.

Ok, guess that’s it for now. Think i’ll try an idea I just came up with and see how well it works out…

Todays accomplishments

Work:

transplanted several servers from one location to another. Slightly more machines than I had planned and took all day as opposed to a few hours like I originally thought. No biggie.

Went back to work for 11pm to move the rest of the machines which don’t play well with customer experience during the day. With Sara’s help we blew through this in 20 minutes.

Home/side work:

Handed off 2 finished laptops

Scheduled 1 customer for tomorrow

Another coming at some point this week that I forgot.

Sara made her first housecall for me to add a laptop to a wireless router. She did have to call me but after telling her to look for wireless on the router page a few times, she finally got it.

Upgrading a mod to an old xbox I did years ago. Still amazed at what these old machines can do and that some things are still being developed for them in the homebrew community.

Made my first blog post

goodnight