(Not) Customizing Gnome

[Paul A Houle]

    Last week I made an attempt to customize the Gnome desktop on 
Fedora/RHEL and was quite shocked to find how hard it is to do.  I've 
been developing a system that lets me log into 20+ server/user 
configurations,  with colorized uxterms (tweaks to the color set so 
color ls is readable on various backgrounds),  expect to pass 
parameters,  all kinds of fun stuff.  When it came time to set up a GUI 
menu,  I hit a brick wall.

    To be fair,  I'm quite impressed with the performance of Gnome on 
older hardware.  I have a ~ 400 MhZ Pentium machine with about ~ 400 MB 
of RAM,  and recent RHEL/Fedora versions boot quickly -- Gnome is 
responsive,  and I've got no complaints about performance.

    The documentation sucks.  Instructions for editing the menu 
graphically "just didn't work."  I spent about four hours searching the 
web before I realized that I'd need to get a PhD in Gnome to be able to 
create arbitrary hiearchies in the 'Hat' menu on the panel.  I had to 
find a mailing list posting to find out that Nautilus is the application 
that displays the right-click menu,  not the WM. 

    The system of vfolders and .desktop files is quite elegant -- it's a 
good set of data structures,  and in a lot of ways it's preferable to 
the way the Start button works on Windows or the non-system of MacOS X.  
To take full advantage of that system,  however,  it would nice to have 
a way to attach categories to applications independent of the .desktop 
file,  perhaps by attaching an emblem to a file.  If one could mark 
applications as being the "Kiosk" category (system wide),  or in the 
"Favorite" category (for a particular user),  that would be a big help.  
What I find particularly exciting about the implementation is that it 
ought to be possible to use the same data structures to create a 
entirely different UI than a 'start button' clone. 

    Gnome is also avoiding the reality that any given user only uses a 
tiny fraction of the applications on a machine.  The Start Menu on 
Windows can get to be a godawful mess,  but at least you can drop  icons 
onto the start button so you can always find your top five 
applications.  People really like the ability to look up the last ten 
apps they ran on Mac OS X,  and this largely makes up for the miserable 
state of the Applications directory.

    It would really help to have an easy way to configure the 
right-click menu,  nautilus-scripts are pretty cool,  but not really 
what I want.  For instance,  on RHEL 4 I'd like to get rid of "Create 
Terminal" and replace it with an entry point to my system so my muscle 
memory doesn't betray me.

    Perhaps I'm bitching too much,  but I still remember the days when 
customizing X Windows on UNIX was as simple as editing a configuration 
file.  Now it's a matter of reading the documentation for hours,  then 
finding out that maybe you need to edit an XML file,  maybe you need to 
use gconf,  or maybe you just can't do it and should write your own 
panel applet instead.

    (That said,  RH has done a lot of good in /etc/sysconfig -- I'm 
always finding new things to love about it.)