Re: RH6.0 Gnewbie usability questions

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

On Sat, 15 May 1999, Nate Cull wrote:
> 
> However, there are a couple of usability issues with GNOME that, as a
> reasonably clueful Windows and KDE user, strike me as utterly and totally
> bizarre, and I'm wondering what the heck I'm doing wrong.  Can anyone help?
>

These are all good questions - I'll try to address the ones I can.
 
> 1.  The GNOME Pager panel applet does not appear to raise windows when the
> taskbar buttons are left-clicked.  It gives selected windows the focus, but
> does not move them to the front.  I can raise a window correctly by
> double-clicking both mouse buttons at once, but this makes all task-switch
> operations about four times more complicated.  This is NOT the expected
> behaviour for anyone used to KDE's KPanel or the Win32 Taskbar.  What am I
> missing?  Tell me this is a bug, and not a feature?  
> 

It works for me with WindowMaker (compiled with Gnome support). So it must
be an E bug, or else configurable somewhere.

> 2.  On a genuine Intel Pentium-MMX 200 with 32mb RAM and 127mb swap space,
> GNOME 1.0 (gnome-core-1.0.4 with the default Enlightenment-0.15.5 wm as
> pre-installed by RH6) appears about 2-3 times slower than KDE 1.1 when running
> my standard Internet browsing applications (Netscape 4.51, kppp 1.6.2, kmail
> 1.0.20).  Is GNOME/Enlightenment *supposed* to be slower than KDE/kwm, or am I
> doing something wrong? 
> 

E is relatively slow (but fast for what it does), kwm is relatively fast
(but slow for what it does). icewm and WindowMaker are both faster than
E/kwm, I'd say. fvwm2 too (CVS fvwm2 has Gnome support I hear). The other
option is scwm, which is pretty darn cool but if speed is your thing it's
probably not the best choice (not that it's slow, but it's not the
fastest).

Of course, speed depends on which theme your running and exactly what 
you are timing.

> Yes, I *know* that running KDE apps under GNOME is almost certainly the Wrong
> Way To Do Things.  I'll try again using GNOME-only apps, and see if my
> performance improves.  But kppp 1.6.2 is the best GUI PPP dialer I've ever seen,
> and it seems a shame to drop it if I can help it.  I'm also aware that 32mb RAM
> is a little on the light side, but again, if KDE can handle it, then presumably
> GNOME should?  I also assume that GNOME's placing the KDE menu on its own start
> menu indicates that KDE apps *are* supposed to be runnable under GNOME?
>

This shouldn't make any difference, except that the KDE apps have their
own shared libs so you'll get more memory usage if you use both kinds of
apps simultaneously. Obviously if you start to swap speed is going to go
to hell. Netscape's statically linked bloat-o-rama doesn't help.
 
> 3.  What the heck:  Just for the record, what *is* the GNOME project's position
> on integration with KDE?  Are we aiming at eventually moving these two desktops
> together, or what?  As a programmer, I don't want to have to support two
> separate desktop environments.  As a user, I just want my apps to run,
> whatever my GUI looks like.  Tell me we're going to unify GNOME and KDE
> somehow.  Please?
> 

They will probably interoperate more and more and the user-visible
differences will fade, but there's no real way to unify them from a
programmer's point of view. Several recent initiatives have appeared:
unification of session management and .desktop files, for example.

Since you use both, you're in an excellent position to work on
interoperability though. :-) 

> 4.  Enlightenment is cool, but I doubt I'll need all that much chrome, and if
> the window manager is slowing my system down I'd prefer a small, fast, manager
> than one with all the bells and whistles  RH6 appears to have installed
> WindowMaker, and I'd like to try it instead.  This is almost certainly an X
> newbie question, but  --- Is there an easy way to change active window
> managers under GNOME?  In RH5.2 it was just a menu selection, and in KDE it was
> a Henry Ford's choice: only kwm.  (No big deal; I'll figure it out eventually,
> but there's probably an easy way and a hard way.)
> 

I believe the Gnome Control Center has a window manager selector applet.
Otherwise, just start the wm you want, and gnome-session should catch on
and restore it next time (in theory...)

> 5.  Again on window managers:  Under both KDE and Win32, when I maximise a
> window, it does not resize to the entire screen, but it respects any existing
> open panels (KDE's KPanel and taskbar, Win32's Start Bar and Office Toolbar)
> and resizes only to the visible desktop area that is not occupied by panels. 
> This is *good*, and this is what I want GNOME to do. 
> 
> However, GNOME 1.0/Enlightenment appears only to respect the Panel when it is
> located at the bottom edge of the screen, and then only when opening new
> windows, not resizing them.  In fact, when I maximise any window under GNOME/E
> it appears to always resize to the full screen, either obscuring the Panel or
> obscuring part of the window.  As a Windows/KDE user who lives by maximised
> windows and non-obscured panels, this is extremely annoying and effectively
> renders GNOME unusable for me as a primary desktop. It also seems like a simple
> enough thing to do, since kwm manages it.  Are there any plans to make
> Enlightenment respect the Panels and resize windows properly to avoid obscuring
> them, or is this not the X way of doing things?  If not, what is the correct X
> equivalent that I should be using?
> 

This is basically a bug I'd say. One of the other gnome compliant wm's
might work better, or a newer version of E. 

> 6. (A tangent, not entirely GNOME related): The more I use GUIs, the more tired
> I get of the traditional overlapping-windows, messy-desktop metaphor, and the
> more I want to experiment with alternatives.  I have a PalmPilot, and using it
> was a revelation.  PalmOS has *no* overlapping windows: just a single
> screen/window area, and a separate (constantly visible) task selector.  It's
> the most usable GUI I've ever seen.  Since GNOME seems to be the world's most
> configurable and hackable desktop, I'm wondering if there's a way to imitate
> this kind of interface in GNOME.  Are there any window managers out there which
> force all displayed windows to be tiled rather than overlapped (you know, like
> Niklaus Wirth's Oberon system, or OS/2 Presentation Manager 1.1)?  Yes, I'm
> aware I'm being a neo-Luddite.  Never mind.  Maybe I'll look at this as my own
> personal programming project (hey, I've got to learn gtk+ sometime)...
> 

Most likely it wouldn't even be very hard to hack a WM to do this. It
wouldn't involve Gnome or Gtk at all; this is purely a WM issue. 

If you know scheme, you could even configure scwm to do this without
touching C code. Might be a nice way to prototype it and see if you like
it.

> 7.  Since the release of RH6, I expect there will be a lot of Gnewbies from
> the  Windows and KDE worlds who will open up the Red Hat boxed pack and trip
> over these (to me obvious and baffling) usability glitches, and hit the
> gnome-list with similar puzzled questions.  I checked the GNOME FAQ yesterday
> and it appears to be at least five months old (update date of 1998).  Is there
> a separate Gnome-List FAQ, or if not, will the GNOME FAQ be updated with a
> section on Red Hat 6.0?
> 

It'll be updated if someone updates it, unfortunately. That's how free
software works; your guess is as good as ours whether someone will move it
to the top of their priority queue and take action. But most likely
someone will eventually. :-)

One way to get the FAQ updated is to summarize posts to the mailing list
in Q&A format, and send them to the FAQ maintainer. :-)

Havoc