Thom's comments on Ubuntu's GNOME
After reading reading Thom Holwerda's post about Ubuntu's GNOME, I noticed that most of his complains were either bugs or works in progress, except for this one:
"GNOME needs a better default layout for its panels. The top bar is wasting an insane amount of space; to the left, we have a few menus and icons, and all the way to the far right we have the system tray and clock. In between, it's all gray. A solution would be to place the taskbar in between those two ends, but on most screens, the space there is just a little too limited to comfortably house the taskbar. Other than that, the top bar becomes extremely cluttered if it also houses the taskbar."
Thom seems to put space efficiency on par with usability, which in't necessarily true. Well, actually those will often be antithetical to each other.
Also the uselessness with which Thom portraits the empty space in the upper panel is hardly deserved. It can be quite handy for placing launchers (for Epiphany, Evolution, etc), and applets (Tomboy Notes, System Monitor, Weather Report, Network Manager, etc).
Housing the taskbar in the upper panel seems like an extremely bad idea, because most important the available space is much too small, so when a lot of applications are opened the application bars are so small, it'll be impossible to differentiate between them, and the taskbar loses it's primary functionality. That's the brillance of putting the taskbar in the lower panel, where there's plenty of room.
"Ubuntu still does not pass my ZipDisk test; nor does any other distribution for that matter. My desktop x86 has an internal IDE ZipDisk drive (250MB), and no matter what distribution I install, neither of them configures fstab correctly so I can use my ZipDisk instantly. And that's for an internal one-- don't get me started on any of my 6 external (parallel) drives. I never got those to work with any operating system (except Windows, as Iomega has drivers for that, obviously). By the way, BeOS/Zeta also passes the internal part of the ZipDisk test."
While Thom is right from a fundamental point of view, having plug and play ZipDisk support seems hardly relevant anymore. ZipDisks were never really popular, so investing a lot of effort in to this would be a waste of time. And considering a wonderful new technology called 'USB Memory Sticks' it would seem silly at best.
"GNOME needs a better default layout for its panels. The top bar is wasting an insane amount of space; to the left, we have a few menus and icons, and all the way to the far right we have the system tray and clock. In between, it's all gray. A solution would be to place the taskbar in between those two ends, but on most screens, the space there is just a little too limited to comfortably house the taskbar. Other than that, the top bar becomes extremely cluttered if it also houses the taskbar."
Thom seems to put space efficiency on par with usability, which in't necessarily true. Well, actually those will often be antithetical to each other.
Also the uselessness with which Thom portraits the empty space in the upper panel is hardly deserved. It can be quite handy for placing launchers (for Epiphany, Evolution, etc), and applets (Tomboy Notes, System Monitor, Weather Report, Network Manager, etc).
Housing the taskbar in the upper panel seems like an extremely bad idea, because most important the available space is much too small, so when a lot of applications are opened the application bars are so small, it'll be impossible to differentiate between them, and the taskbar loses it's primary functionality. That's the brillance of putting the taskbar in the lower panel, where there's plenty of room.
"Ubuntu still does not pass my ZipDisk test; nor does any other distribution for that matter. My desktop x86 has an internal IDE ZipDisk drive (250MB), and no matter what distribution I install, neither of them configures fstab correctly so I can use my ZipDisk instantly. And that's for an internal one-- don't get me started on any of my 6 external (parallel) drives. I never got those to work with any operating system (except Windows, as Iomega has drivers for that, obviously). By the way, BeOS/Zeta also passes the internal part of the ZipDisk test."
While Thom is right from a fundamental point of view, having plug and play ZipDisk support seems hardly relevant anymore. ZipDisks were never really popular, so investing a lot of effort in to this would be a waste of time. And considering a wonderful new technology called 'USB Memory Sticks' it would seem silly at best.
posted by Pascal de Bruijn at
15:56
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