winscape 2339

Um .... With all due respect, then, what you use "top" for and what I *think* most people use a taskbar for seem to be somewhat different.

What I use the GNOME taskbar for (and I do run GNOME from time to time, for reasons that seem good to me but don't seem discussion-worthy) is as a way of being able to have multiple windows "open" at the same time, but not all on the screen -- by minimizing the one(s) I'm not currently using, and then clicking on the taskbar icon to un-minimize one. Multiple workspaces would work too, but I've been too lazy to figure out how to set that up. (I know it's not rocket science, just something I don't care about enough .... ) In twm, I can have a similar collection of icons (for minimized windows) in one corner of the screen.

What "top" provides is .... something else.

I've just realized that in the current FC4 GNOME configuration, there's not only a task bar at the bottom of the screen but also something across the top of the screen, and the thing across the top of the screen is where they're putting program-launching menus. *More* screen real estate ....

snip

Ooh, yet another rant topic .... I had carefully set up my .mailcap file so that mutt would launch what *I* think are useful programs for dealing with MS Word, etc., attachments. And then I ran a new version of OpenOffice for the first time, and it performed some sort of "install" that among other things (who knows what, you know?) cluttered up that .mailcap file with lines buttociating the various MS Office MIME types with itself. Grrrr.

This is maybe not what you were talking about, but perhaps it's along the same lines.

As you say, it does seem that GNOME is too similar to Windows for our comfort. I don't know whether this is a deliberate attempt by the developers to make Windows people feel comfortable enough to switch operating systems (which has some merit), or it's just that all they really know in the way of user interface is Windows. One hopes it's not the latter, but who knows.

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