now a raving gnomeatic

[Daniel Chudnov <daniel.chudnov@yale.edu>]

Hi all, and pardon the x-post.  Just wanted to chime in with my $0.02
about gnome.

Remember back when you had that tape drive with the nail polish at the
right level on the volume dial so your favorite text adventure would load
into your trs80 ok the first time (even though it took 40 minutes), and
then you got an apple ][e with the extra 16kb card which was so great
because it gave you 80-columns, and the Mac came out and you could just
point and clickclickclick all day and get so much done, and hey there was
a point when dos was pretty darn good if sorta plain and utilitarian but
you got work done on it, and then... 

...a few years pass...

...and...

...nothing.  We're (mostly) all stuck with machines with opaque internals
that only make you happy when you can read someone's important email
attachment, but darn it all, that should be _normal_ dammit, not
extraordinary.  Sure, the web changed everything, but that was five years
ago.

Well, I'm here to say that it's finally that time again, you know, that
time when you sit down in front of your machine and think, "hey, this is a
_lot_ of fun, look what I can do with this!"

At least for me.  In the last few days I've upgraded my two main machines
(the workhorse and the hometoy) to gnome1.0.something and Hot Diggety, I
like it.  Yeah, it was a bit of a hassle to get rid of dependency
conflicts but I learned much in the process and after all, rpm -e and rpm
-Uvh aren't too difficult to keep straight.  Yeah, it's still a little
buggy and slows down sometimes but... um... so do Expensive os's.  And
yeah, I still need the apps on the NT4 side, but actually I need them less
and less because most of what I'm doing is webbed anyway.

And I don't have it all tweaked out with funky themes and all because I
can't figure out how to install them right, but that's ok for now. 
Because I now smile when I startx and enlightenment kicks in and the panel
comes up and I slide it to the left and then to the right just because I
can, and gtcd/cddb shows me what Marvin Gaye's singing to me just in case
I didn't remember and the windows slide around all translucent-like, and I
play some gnuthello or whatever it's called and hey, I can beat that pesky
Deep Blue wannabe over and over again, even on level 3.  Well, it beat me
once, but even the Broncos lost a couple.

Ok, so it's a little weird that I get such naches from a complex bundle of
finite state machines, but c'mon, you know what I'm talking about, don't
you?

Imho of all the pieces on gnome I've read through (and wow, have there
been lots in the mainstream) I recommend the Village Voice article
referenced today at slashdot. 


So to the $0.02 part:  If you're running linux, do yourself a favor and
take gnome for a spin.  If you can't find answers to difficulties along
the way (the instructions are good, but I had some hassles too), ask me.



  -Dan