Sunday 19 March 2006

KISS of death (Keep it stupidly simple)

GNOME takes the biscuit (Americans seem to like that word lately).

The new GNOME Screensaver UI is so stupid you can’t actually do anything useful apart from choose the screen saver.

I upgraded Ubuntu from Breezy so at least my GLSlideShow screensaver works, cos I configured it before I upgraded to Dapper, but some poor folk are stuck! Dapper GNOME screensaver UI doesn’t even let them tell GLSlideShow WHERE to find the photos! See their cries of pain in their bug report.

GNOME is going so far backwards that only a granny will be happy with it, any one with an ounce of sense will quickly graduate to KDE so that they can do someting the way they want to, see my cries of pain at regressing from a quick cross-fading slideshow of all my photos to a ghastly 5 times showing over 10 seconds for each photo. 

When family members pass around new photos I don’t spend 10 seconds looking at a single one, I certainly don’t want to spend 10 seconds on a load I’ve seen before.

Of course with GNOME, thats what I’m doomed to, until the GUI designers think it worthwhile, but I doubt that they’ll descend from their abstract usability values to something so concrete as actual usability.

Of course I could fork GNOME (free software is all about freedom, which GNOME are denying me) or just move to KDE.

Thank goodness for Kubuntu.

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