Fedora Woes

[Jing Su]

>    Nautilus: the all singing, all dancing, swiss army chainsaw that eats
>    memory for lunch and serves no useful purpose whatsoever.

Well, I'll throw in my own 2 cents on all this.

I've tried all incarnations of KDE and GNOME, old and new, as well as
going bare with a simple window manager like TWM, OpenBox, WindowMaker,
FVWM, etc.

Right now, I'm using Gnome 2.6, built from source.  Thus far, I'm still
trying to get used to the "spacial nautilus", because I'm so used to
navigating through a directory tree.  But, as I use it, it's slowly
growing on me.

As to objections about the speed at which Gnome works, yes, it is a little
slow, especially when lots of eye candy are turned on.  But, I have a
400Mhz Pentium, and the delays are only one or two seconds at the most
when it has to reload and cache icons and textures.  Not really a huge
performance impact, especially considering that most modern machines are
much faster with more RAM.  On my 2.4Ghz workstation at school, Gnome
suffers no noticable slowdowns whatsoever.

Nautilus, as I understand it, is like a graphical Bash.  Yes, some people
argue that Bash, as a shell, is overly bloated; but that's a different
story.  Most of all the specialized handlers for Nautilus are done through
plugins that follow the Gnome component connector model (Bonobo?), so in a
sense it still does follow the unix philosophy.  The special stuff is
still done through "small" supporting utilities.

I do miss the control-center package that KDE offers, but Gnome somewhat
makes up for it by providing a "Desktop Preferences" menu sub-tree that
basically has every customizable setting grouped in it.  So in a sense, it
is like a control-center, just embedded into the menu.

One more thing that I've noticed is that all the fancy sub-pixel
anti-aliasing font stuff is a little slow, making the gnome-terminal
refresh noticably slower on my 400Mhz machine at home.  But if you make
Gnome use the standard rasterized old X-fonts, the font rendering becomes
much faster.


-Jing
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