The desktop/window manager war is driving me nuts sometimes. Being a crotchety old geek I can live with most of it, but I can just imagine the following conversation taking place…
“Hey, I just started this program and I’ve got this extra icon floating around here. What’s with this?”
“Oh that’s the dock icon. It just displays a convenient status summary in the window manager’s dock.”
“Um, shouldn’t it actually be *in* the dock then?”
“Well, normally yes. That’s a Qt program, not GTK, and you’re running GNOME aren’t you?”
“Yes I am, but it says it’s GNOME-compatible.”
“Which version are you using?”
“The latest 2.x, of course.”
“Oh, well, they changed the window manager in that version. It doesn’t have that dock anymore.”
“What do I do then?”
“Maybe there’s a preference or command-line option or something somewhere that can turn it off or something…”
“But, when I start some other programs they display their own icon in the upper-right menubar corner. Isn’t that the dock?”
“Well, yes, but it’s a different *kind* of dock…”
“AAAAAAUGGH!!!”
Keep on blogging, you old crotchety geek. :-D
The old double standard rears its’ ugly head and roars out: “Too standardized is bad, but too decentralized is bad as well!”
So the pain remains. Do we sit and watch people go apeshit because of open-ended possibility of app behavior under the management of many different environments, or do we allow choices to be abandoned in favor of ease-of-use consistency and standardization of application?
For that matter, since the topic is (possibly) unanswerable questions, what is the meaning of life?
Personally, I’ll go with open-ended choice. I realize the hassles of making that decision, but then, I read somewhere once that “Linux is only for people who have too much time on their hands”. I’m okay with that, true or not. It feels like accomplishment.
Oh, and the meaning of life?
44.94.
(42 + G.S.T.)
— 0x01