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Annoyed at GNOME
Aug. 7th, 2006 01:36 amFirst time getting around to posting in three months, and what do I do? Gripe about UI...
The GNOME I'm talking about is the GNU window manager found on many Linux systems, including Ubuntu, which is what I'm using right now while I write this post. What's getting to me about it is the design of the panels -- they're strips sort of like the Windows taskbar or the Mac menu bar, and Ubuntu normally has two of them, one at the top of the screen and one at the bottom.
What's annoying me about the panels is that I can't move them to the sides of the screen. Well, I can, but the standard GNOME panels just aren't designed to go there... the top one ends up having the writing sideways (!), and the bottom one (the one with the Windows-style task buttons for running programs) ends up looking really ugly and dysfunctional. I'm using my laptop, which has a widescreen LCD, and I'd really rather get the screen height back from the panels to make my windows a bit longer (since this is a widescreen system, I have plenty of width available, so I won't miss that); when I run Windows or KDE on this system, I put the taskbar on the right side, and when I use a Mac with a widescreen display, I always put the application bar on the side as well.
I also miss the neat shortcuts available in KDE for maximizing windows in only one direction. If you left-click on the maximize button, it does the usual thing of making the window occupy the entire screen. But a right-click expands it only to full width, and a middle-click expands it to full height. I usually want my web browser windows full height, especially on a short screen like this one, but I don't want them full width.
If Ubuntu were a badly designed system, I could just shrug off these lapses. But mostly it's a very good Linux distro, aside from the hoops that you have to jump through to install some of the usual non-free software that people want on their machines (things like the Adobe Reader, Macromedia Flash player, and Sun Java), it's really ready for use by non-techies. I suppose I could just install Kubuntu and use KDE instead, but the Ubuntu people put most of their work into the GNOME-based version, and therefore it's better thought out and visually designed.
The GNOME I'm talking about is the GNU window manager found on many Linux systems, including Ubuntu, which is what I'm using right now while I write this post. What's getting to me about it is the design of the panels -- they're strips sort of like the Windows taskbar or the Mac menu bar, and Ubuntu normally has two of them, one at the top of the screen and one at the bottom.
What's annoying me about the panels is that I can't move them to the sides of the screen. Well, I can, but the standard GNOME panels just aren't designed to go there... the top one ends up having the writing sideways (!), and the bottom one (the one with the Windows-style task buttons for running programs) ends up looking really ugly and dysfunctional. I'm using my laptop, which has a widescreen LCD, and I'd really rather get the screen height back from the panels to make my windows a bit longer (since this is a widescreen system, I have plenty of width available, so I won't miss that); when I run Windows or KDE on this system, I put the taskbar on the right side, and when I use a Mac with a widescreen display, I always put the application bar on the side as well.
I also miss the neat shortcuts available in KDE for maximizing windows in only one direction. If you left-click on the maximize button, it does the usual thing of making the window occupy the entire screen. But a right-click expands it only to full width, and a middle-click expands it to full height. I usually want my web browser windows full height, especially on a short screen like this one, but I don't want them full width.
If Ubuntu were a badly designed system, I could just shrug off these lapses. But mostly it's a very good Linux distro, aside from the hoops that you have to jump through to install some of the usual non-free software that people want on their machines (things like the Adobe Reader, Macromedia Flash player, and Sun Java), it's really ready for use by non-techies. I suppose I could just install Kubuntu and use KDE instead, but the Ubuntu people put most of their work into the GNOME-based version, and therefore it's better thought out and visually designed.
