Lonely Cactus

For the past few months, I've given up any real hacking.  I've weaned myself off of the antidepressants I was taking, and then I found that to retain my sanity I really needed to up the amount of exercise, sunshine, and fresh air I was getting to keep my emotions up.  So I've become quite the exercise fanatic of late: not because I like it, but, because it is necessary.

So, I have not touched any of my software projects for a couple of months.

But, after having read all of the horrible things said about Gnome 3, I wanted to experience the horror myself.  So I wiped the Dell PowerEdge T100 server and put Fedora 15 on it.

Installation was painless, but, it let me know that I didn't have the graphics power to run Gnome 3 in regular mode, so it runs in 'fallback' mode.  Fallback mode is quite nice, but, there are many oddities.

The default wallpaper is some blue stripes, which I did not find very soothing.  Right-clicking on the desktop does nothing, so, to change the wallpaper in fallback mode, you have to select Applications > System Tools > System Setting, select "Background" from the "Personal" section of the dialog, and then choose something else.

My workflow has always been based on leaving my currently active files and folders on the desktop.  My habit is to have my current projects on the desktop and inactive projects are stored in Documents.  Gnome 3's fallback mode does not allow files on the desktop, but, you can enable that feature.  Install and run the gnome-tweak-tool.  In its 'File Manager' section, set "Have file manager handle the desktop" to "On".  I found that trick here.

The next aggravation I found was that if you select a file in a File Manager window and then press the key, nothing happens.  You can right-click and select "Move to Trash".  But, I'd prefer that the key delete a file.  I eventually came across Gnome bug 647048 that says that this was intentional, and that now Ctrl+ is used to move a file to the trash.  I find changes like this to be the most worrisome, because I bounce between multiple operating systems as part of my job.  Certain actions are so fundamental as to be muscle memory and are uniform across my platforms.

I pulled a USB drive without unmounting.  That didn't go well.

Anyway, I don't really use Gnome for anything other than as a window and file manager, so I probably am not really get too deeply into this.