Xfce, ubuntu and gnome ...

[Robin Haswell]

Hm I'm not talking about preventing you from switching from GNOME to 
XFCE, that should be pretty straight forward, my beef is that GNOME 
seems to fall apart if you remove components that should be swappable, 
like the window manager.

Has anyone else noticed that if you try to change window managers in 
GNOME (which is obtuse anyway), gnome-session will inexplicably hang 
while launching the WM for many minutes? I don't know if it's just me, 
but I've tried 'echo export WINDOW_MANAGER=xfwm4 > ~/.gnomerc', hacking 
the default.session files and even editing the gnome-wm script, and I 
can't solve the problem. In the end I had to make sure xfdesktop started 
before the WM just so I could do something while gnome-session sorts 
itself out.

I like gnome, it's got some bloody great helper apps that take the 
tedium out of running a desktop Linux system, and help me Get Stuff Done 
(tm), but its constant patronisation of its users really pisses me off 
sometimes.

Arjen Stolk wrote:
> I don't think it's fair to just blame GNOME for that. I just changed
> over from Gnome to Xfce on SUSE 10.0 and I haven't run into a single
> problem. Of course, having said that, I fully expect things to start
> going wrong immediately :)
> 
> Arjen
> 
> On 3/4/06, Robin Haswell <rob at digital-crocus.com> wrote:
>> Does anyone else think that Gnome is as close to "vendor lock-in" as you
>> get in FOSS? I've lost count of the issues I've had to fix as a result
>> of simply trying to change window and desktop managers in GNOME.
>>
>> -Rob
>>
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