Removing GNOME
I’ve been quite happy with my choice of software for quite some time now. But recently I’ve been getting annoyed by evince because it’s forgotton how to remember things. It never remembers its window size anymore, or the page you were at in your PDFs. And of course it has no way of setting the browser to use for URL hyperlinks.
Of course I blamed gconf, without really finding out if it’s at fault. I have issues with gconf:
- It smells too much like the Windows registry.
- It’s hard to alter program settings in there, if they get messed up. Apparently gconf-editor is something the GNOME folks didn’t even want to create.
- There’s already a perfectly good dotfile convention.
So I decided to get rid of gconf and everything that uses it, which thankfully turned out to be not too much: gnumeric, DVDstyler, gedit, and a few other things. As a bonus, I replaced gedit with the much faster and more featureful geany!
So long GNOME, you won’t see me again.
Posted Tuesday, June 1, 2010