I am no longer using GNOME but Xfce and this has nothing to do with GNOME Shell. I already switched a long time ago. But as the (co-)maintainer of several terminals in Fedora, I wondered how to enable users to easily switch their default terminal emulator in GNOME 3.
In the past users could just select the their favorite terminal in gnome-default-applications-properties. Some things required additional configuration: For a mail client the system needs to know the command to compose a new mail or to add attachments and for a terminal emulator an option to run something in a terminal is required. Developers could pre-configure these values with an xml file in $(prefix)/gnome-control-center/default-apps.
When I asked how to do all this in GNOME 3, Bastien (who helped to invent this nice mechanism in GNOME 2) after a little back and forth told me how things work in GNOME 3. They don’t…
“Because we’re not designing a desktop for people who like to choose their own terminal emulators.“
This “We are not designing a desktop for people who …” has become a new meme. GNOME 3 is not designed for people
- who want to minimize windows
- who want to change the theme, icons or fonts
- who want to configure power management actions
- who want to use panel applets/extensions that can easily be added or removed
- who want to select their native language on the login screen instead of having to re-login after they have changed it in the control center
- who want to use their keyboard layout so they can actually log in
- who want to shutdown their computers from within a GNOME session
and many other people I forgot. If GNOME continues to narrow down their target audience like this, I wonder if there is actually somebody left.
Simple tasks like selecting a preferred application are made very hard just to then claim “This is something only hackers do”. In the past one could just remove the accessibility or bluetooth icons from the panel by not starting them, now one needs to write extensions for that purpose. One even needs an extension to move the clock. But wait: Is GNOME 3 designed for people who know how to write extensions?
If you think that GNOME is still a nice desktop after all and should not become too simplistic, please support my RFE by adding your two cents. Too bad voting in GNOME’s bugzilla is disabled.
