winscape 2337

"Mess" is not a bad description, AFAICT: Looking at the dot-something files and directories in my home directory, there's .gnome, .gnome2, and .gnome2private. (Why all three? Yeah.) But there's also .gconf and .gconfd, which appear to contain GNOME-related configuration information. And then there are other directories that also seem to be involved (based on my recollections of trying to come up with a complete list of directories that need to be deleted-moved in order to perform a "start again from scratch"). ("Start again from scratch". Hm, does that sound suspiciously like the "reinstall" we were talking about in another subthread a few weeks ago. Windows influence again?)

However, as you say, the mess is somewhat more bounded than it might be in Windowsland, and the fact that they're all text files means that even that blunderbuss "start from scratch" operation can be revised into "move all the configuration files to another location, let GNOME recreate them, and compare the result with the stuff moved to the other location", which allows for the possibility of recovering some customizations without repeating the pointing and clicking.

I can remember my first exposure to CDE. "What is this??!! I thought this was a Unix box ...."

top can be used as a taskbar? you must know some tricks with it I don't.

snip

Exactly. And don't get me started on the apparent drive to replace useful old single-purpose programs with all-in-one "improvements" (e.g., FC4 comes with "evince", a program for viewing many kinds of file formats, but not with "xv" or "gv"). Fortunately a lot of the old stuff can still be tracked down somewhere and reinstalled.

Grumble, grumble .... Well, as you say, as long as they leave us out of it.

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.