Some recent changes

[Martin Sourada]

On Tue, 2009-10-20 at 14:13 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-10-20 at 14:11 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > Jeroen van Meeuwen (kanarip at kanarip.com) said: 
> > > Next time, I might just re-consider using KDE (and have my users use
> > > KDE as well, while I'm at it).
> > 
> > GNOME adds a configuration setting that wasn't there before, user threatens
> > to go to KDE. There's a first for everything!
> 
> We can't win...
> 
No, you certainly cannot if you keep on announcing the changes precisely
at the time they are made, doing those highly late in the release cycle
without any apparent "polish plan" being put together ahead. If you want
to polish desktop, first outline what you feel is wrong, unpolished,
crappy and how do you want to change that *and* discuss it with (usually
development) community. If you have usability studies, include them as
well in the proposal. *Then* do the changes. That's the way how every
other teams in Fedora are working -- why do you need to work
differently? I don't really mind very much that you do these kind of
things late in the release cycle -- they could hardly break anything --
but they should be planned at the start of the release cycle *and*
discussed with the community not just in your office. Fedora is done
differently from Red Hat Linux.

And to comment on the changes:
I don't recall our default panel height setting, so correct me if I'm
wrong, but subjectively speaking 10px padding for 22x22px big icons is a
little bit too much, isn't it? Plus, it's a really big problem for small
screens. Why different padding for notification icons and the rest? It's
inconsistent. Where does the 10px value comes from? It's just that it's
nice round number? Do *you* think it's the best value? What do others
think about the value? (Yep, I think 0px might not be the best default,
so I'm concerned only with the amount, not much with the change itself).

Show desktop -- well, for some reason I keep it on my panel config, even
though I don't use it. I've never hit it by mistake. But Mo provided
quite a handful of reasons why it shouldn't be there by default, so I
don't really have anything against this change.

Two virtual desktops -- why 2? If you use virtual desktops, you're IMHO
much more likely to use more then just two (I myself use six), if you
don't use virtual desktops you don't care whether you have four or
two... I really don't understand the reasons behind this, but well,
since I already use something different from default, it's not affecting
me.

Notify icons sorting -- nice change. I'm only concerned whether they
should not be aligned to the left (as the handle is left, so if we want
to keep them on their place, they need to start filling from the left,
and adding new icons to the right). Perhaps I misunderstood what you
wrote. Come to think of it, it would be even better if I could sort them
myself and the applet would remember how I order them (perhaps a RFE
within F13 scope?).

Default location for time -- nice change, I think no one can have
anything against it. It's an improvement in functionality and not a
rather radical (or highly visible) change that would anger dozens of
people (like the icons padding).

Martin
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