Comment of the Day - November 13, 2005 - Can't Win for Losing

We expanding GNOME at our office at the expense of mostly Windows 95. While GNOME, Fedora, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, etc. are excellent tools, they could use some polish in certain areas. Also, some of the following aren't GNOME or KDE's fault.

GNOME and KDE need better configuration management. Sabayon is very immature (e.g. it got confused by a URL in a value and though the URL was a comment because it had //). Kiosktool could use a lot of help too. Then, many programs (xscreensaver, OpenOffice.org, XMMS) simply aren't managed by Sabayon or Kiosktool. OpenOffice.org's XML registry is relatively difficult to manage using the command line: you can't use sed with OOo, for example, like with XMMS.

KDE's printing system is great, and GNOME's is OK. But not many programs use these print systems. For example, it's a difficult to make Firefox use non-default printing options such as trays and duplex. Also, Evince's printing is horribly broken, and Adobe Acrobat Reader doesn't know CUPS exists.

People just don't get the GTK file chooser: it's confusing. Novices end up saving everything into one directory as the default file type. And for me, it's really annoying to expand the options for browsing for files and file types, and then it's cumbersome to navigate the directory tree with the keyboard. On the other hand, the KDE file chooser is excellent.

Nautilus and Konqueror should have built-in tools for manipulating POSIX and NT ACL file permissions.

Otherwise, we use GNOME at our office, and I really like it.