There’s been a lot of fallout from Linus’ latest criticism of the GNOME desktop, with which I complete agree. I feel as if I need to comment on some of the responses.

Carthik Sharma writes in Of Apples and Oranges, GNOME and KDE:

I dread having to find something, since it most definitely will be placed in some non-intuitive sub-menu.

KDE has no control over where applications decide to place themselves.

I like the way GNOME display fonts on the screen. I don’t want to have to change every little variable to get the perfect system.

GNOME pioneered use of fontconfig; in fact, lately, GNOME has been pioneering the use of many next-gen APIs and technologies (e.g. AIGLX, Beryl, etc). But Qt/KDE have also been using fontconfig for several years now—what’s different?

Interesting enough, there has been criticism about how GNOME handles fonts. Taking points from that article, GNOME’s font configuration is a mess:

• What’s a “Terminal” font (it should be called “Monospace,” as it is in KDE, because this is how it’s also used throughout GNOME)?
• What does “size” mean (apparently, it’s not what you think)?
• Why do I care about the subpixel ordering of my fonts’ antialiasing?
• Why would I need to set fonts at all (see my weblog entry The GNOME font dialog, why?)?

KDE is no different than GNOME in trying to provide “sensible” defaults, defaults that its developers have decided are intrinsic to a “perfect desktop.” But, what the developers have decided is the perfect desktop may not be your perfect desktop—and here lies the essence of Linus’ argument, and the difference with KDE and GNOME. With KDE, you may have an option to make a setup “perfect”; with GNOME, quite often the option won’t exist and you are limited to what the powers that be decided was perfect for them, not you. This is Linus’ argument: GNOME is limiting.

Note: If you are running Ubuntu 7.04 or greater, this article is no longer relevant. Your EVDO modem should be detected and run at a higher speed automatically.

I’ve been raving about cellular wireless modems/data cards for a while now. While they’ve been available for a long while, they’ve finally become practical with networks such as EVDO and HSPDA that offer broadband-like speeds. I personally own a Novatel Merlin S720 that I use with Sprint’s Mobile Broadband service.

Most of these datacards are easy to get running in Linux—I actually setup mine in Linux faster than I did in Microsoft Windows. However, due to some shortcomings in the kernel used by Ubuntu GNU/Linux 6.10, you cannot take advantage of the speeds that these modern wireless networks offer.

This article talks about some of the problems of the often-used usbserial driver, and how to use the better-performing airprime driver instead.

Former id games mapper, and creator of the classic 3rd person game Alice, American McGee has switched to Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu Linux only gets more and more popular…

Playing around with Ubuntu 6.06, I noticed that in the Software Preferences, that part of the default “Channels” (which are in actuality lines in /etc/apt/sources.list) include those for the Ubuntu’s packages’ sources.

I’m not sure why these are there by default… How many users actually need to recompile a package when the distribution came with a binary one? In my 5 yrs of using Linux, I’ve never needed to. Yes, I understand the whole free software and GPL thing, where sources must be available with software. This doesn’t mean that new users (a large part of Ubuntu’s user base) need to waste bandwidth and disk space on things they will hopefully never need to use.

I don’t see the practical use for distributing sources with a distribution. If you do need to compile something to get an install up and running, you may need the source for one single piece of software, and you won’t be going to the sources included with the distribution—after all, if their original binary package didn’t help, what use is re-creating a binary for the same version? You’ll be getting the latest version off the Internet and using that. It probably won’t even be by the makers of the distribution, but upstream somewhere. E.g. ditching a vendor kernel for one from kernel.org.

With Ubuntu, I can’t really complain much, as one only ends up downloading some relatively small text files. Back in the days when I used Redhat it was a different story: I’d spend a month downloading the latest Redhat ISO image, half of which was source RPMs that as a Linux newbie I had no use for.