GTK+ is not GNOME’s

So I read this arti­cle this morn­ing on work on GNOME opti­miza­tion and they men­tion the “GNOME file chooser”. Lo and behold, they actu­ally mean the GTK+ file­chooser, some­thing avail­able in any GTK+ appli­ca­tion, not just in GNOME’s. Per­haps it’s a pedan­tic dis­tinc­tion, but I think it’s an impor­tant one. Linux users should have a clear descrip­tion of how things work (not to say that said descrip­tion should be com­pli­cated) and GNOME holds too impor­tant a posi­tion to be say­ing inac­cu­rate things, in my opinion.

I don’t think I’d care as much, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen GNOME say­ing such things. This 2.12 pre­view lists Evo­lu­tion as a “mail client for GNOME”, but I hap­pily use it when not in GNOME. And this leads me to a sore point with GNOME apps.

Many GNOME apps carry extra depen­den­cies that a non-GNOME user wouldn’t have. Often, these depen­den­cies are unnec­es­sary. A pop­u­lar exam­ple lately is Evince, which relies on gnome-vfs. Nau­tilus, GNOME’s file man­ager, also con­trols the desk­top, but the default behav­ior of run­ning the “nau­tilus” com­mand is to open a file man­ager win­dow and, if not already, take over the desk­top. There’s a flag ( – no-desktop) and a GConf set­ting that can be set, but in my opin­ion, the default is a poor choice. Bet­ter would be to have “nau­tilus –desk­top” run the desk­top process and have “nau­tilus” only open a file man­ager win­dow. The GNOME startup set­tings are very good, and you can have the desk­top started therein.

This kind of devel­op­ment and pub­lic­ity, in my opin­ion, is telling. It seems GNOME devel­op­ers are devel­op­ing for GNOME. They have a very respectable inte­grated desk­top, but these types of things belie a narrow-minded atti­tude that hurts Linux as a whole in my opin­ion. With Linux being gen­er­ally mod­u­lar – cus­tomiz­able from the ker­nel up, chock full of func­tion­al­ity whether on the com­mand line or in a GUI (of which you have many choices), and many choices of appli­ca­tions to suit your need and taste, etc. – I think it’s frus­trat­ing to see GNOME be so self-oriented.

Rather, I pre­fer Xfce’s atti­tude towards their soft­ware; they make things such that the user can use any piece of their choos­ing in any envi­ron­ment. No unnec­es­sary depen­den­cies, because the user’s choice is val­ued. In fact, think­ing about it, I’d say that whereas it seems that GNOME devel­ops for GNOME, Xfce devel­ops for the user. For exam­ple, Thu­nar, Xfce’s upcom­ing file man­ager (being devel­oped cur­rently), looks very much like Nau­tilus and will pro­vide com­pa­ra­ble func­tion­al­ity, but per­forms faster (in my expe­ri­ence, and I under­stand that this is not a com­pletely fair com­par­i­son at this point) and has a shorter depen­dency list. Xfme­dia, a media player that uses Xine, doesn’t do as much as GNOME’s default, Totem, but per­forms bet­ter (when using GStreamer or Xine) and has a sim­pler UI. Of course, there’s also the fact that Xfce’s win­dow man­ager, per­haps the most impor­tant piece of the desk­top puz­zle, is incred­i­bly more use­ful and ele­gantly designed than GNOME’s metacity.

I really appre­ci­ate GNOME’s efforts on the desk­top and rec­om­mend them to any per­son new to Linux, but as some­one who’s been around for a lit­tle while, I’m just a bit disappointed.

Dis­claimer: I do not rep­re­sent Xfce in any way (though I use it pri­mar­ily and enjoy it) and in fact, I run GNOME’s panel and vol­ume man­ager on my Xfce desk­top because I like them.