Liuw's Thinkpad

It’s SUNDAY! Time for ranting!

It may seem weired that I rant in English — anyway I’m not a native English speaker and the best rant always comes from one’s mother tongue. BUT there is no Chinese input method on this system, so I have to writing this down in English.

You can bet I’m on Linux now, yes, you’re right. I’m playing with Fedora 16 in a live USB key. The default desktop is Gnome 3 — another disaster for a long time Gnome 2 user. It seems that the Unity-like UI is getting more and more popular. Well, I can adapt myself to new UI. However, PLEASE do better design. The new UI is driving both ordinary users and developers (who use Linux as developing platform) away IMHO.

For new users / Linux noobs: Configuration ability is very weak — look at those few icons in the control panel. What’s worse, the default style of the desktop sucks — large portion of my screen is occupied by useless window frame and menu (take firefox as an example). I wish I could tweak font size to make it not so ugly, but I just can’t find a tool to do that. This will eventually lead to comments like “Linux is ugly and difficult to use”.

For developers: How can I tweak this system? I need my menu back! Those visual effects are good, but they don’t add up productivity. Grouping appications is a good move, but the big icons scattering all over the screen makes me feel bad. Searching applications? That works on the basis that your application shows up in the groups. In a word, they are not helping at all. My observation is that few of my friend (low level) developers will use either Unity or Gnome 3.

Well, some other suggestions include switching to Arch or Gentoo. But I’m not very into those two distros. My principle is “buzheteng”. I would rather focus on my job. I’m really tired of writing configurations line by line with my bare hands. I need a out-of-the-box distro.

How about switching to other desktop environment? KDE? No, I had very bad experience long time ago which effectively shadows me nowadays. LXDE and XFCE? They are just too light-weighted, I need full featured desktop.

Linux desktop is evolving, that’s good. I’m just too out-dated to catch up with its pace. I can not appreciate the new changes due to my out-dated tastes. I’m considering buying a Macbook now, seriously.

UPDATED:
To my surprise, KDE works much better than Gnome 3 for me. The UI is smoother than I expected. But (well, there is always a “but”) the concept of “activity” is driving me mad (What? I need to switch “desktop icons” activity to view my icons? Then switch back to “desktop” activity to see my applications?). Grouping applications is one thing, grouping activities is another. I don’t like the idea of switching among different activities just to separate what you’re doing, I would rather use different workspaces to achieve the same goal.