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It's important to understand ESR's objections to Gnome 3. You can read them here:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3822

His biggest objection to Gnome is this: "While you can add applets to the fake GNOME panel, you cannot remove them or shuffle them around. Eventually, by making a fresh account, taking checksums of its dotfiles, adding an applet, and taking checksums again, I found out that the new panel configuration lives in a file called .config/dconf/user that is an opaque binary blob."

ESR is right, using binary blobs for configuration is a major UNIX sin. As he writes: "burying my configuration inside an opaque binary blob – that is unforgivably stupid and bad engineering. How did forty years of Unix heritage comes to this?"



I haven't been able to try the new Gnome out out, as it doesn't like Virtualbox.

Usually I don't care what ESR thinks of anything but....binary blob configuration? What in the holy hell?
I mean, even MS is moving away from the binary blob registry ad somehow, somewhere, someone in GNOME thinks this abomination is a good idea?
In Gods name, Why?
For shame.

ESR should lay down the crack pipe, and you with him.

you two obviously haven't been working for the past 6 or 7 years to optimize the startup time of a complex system, with multiple moving parts, all reading the configuration from a centralized source (necessary so that you get notifications when anything changes, instead of using a ton of file system notifications and run through the kernel limits).

using text for the database is stupid, wasteful, and totally inefficient.

text for configuration is useful if you have to read it once, and the only write operation happens as the user opens the file with a text editor; imagine if we said that Gnome users had to stop the session to change the settings, and that there would be no settings UI whatsoever.

oh, well, this is ESR, who doesn't believe in allocating memory, and left a static array of 1024 multi-kilobyte structures in GPSD:

http://gypsy.freedesktop.org/why-not-gpsd.html

So, the 'binary blob' comes from dconf, which provides an implementation of Glib's settings API. If you don't like it, there's nothing stopping anyone from writing a replacement that uses text files - in theory, it wouldn't be all that hard, as none of the Gnome code should be using dconf directly...

I like Gnome 3. Yes, it isn't perfect and I have to fiddle with text files more than I'd like to, but overall I still like it.

Me too !

Me too !


I moved to Xubuntu years ago. Gnome and KDE became huge, bloated, slow, and buggy... XFCE was a drink of cool clear water on a hot afternoon.

All my systems now run Xubuntu - all the advantages of the Ubuntu devs and repos with all the goodness that is XFCE.

Gnome Shell is Gnome Shell, it's not Gnome 2. It's not MEANT to be anything like the earlier experience. If you use it as a desktop environment in its own right rather than just "They took away my Gnome 2" then you'll be much happier.

The whole thing is indeed not Gnome 2, it's called Gnome 3 - such name suggests a reasonably incremental modifications; something MEANT to be reasonably close to earlier experience.

I suggest LXDE