GNOME, vous faites ch*er
Comme vous le savez peut-être, je maintiens un document d'auto-formation intitulé Formation Debian. Le chantier du moment, c'est donc de la mettre à jour pour la prochaine sortie de Debian Wheezy. Je voudrais donc profiter de ce travail pour énoncer le message suivant : GNOME, vous faites ch*er.
Opportunistic SSH agent
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line, Lazyweb
To use an SSH agent, one usually has to:
- launch the agent;
- add his key to it.
The first step can be automated in the desktop or shell startup script (this is a typical use case for login shell-only startup scripts, by the way), but the second one cannot if your private key is protected by a passphrase.
GNOME 3 killing interface consistency
I used to recommend the GNOME desktop for simple users for two main advantages over Windows:
- the logical, automatically filled and translated applications menu (compare that to the messy Windows Programs menu…);
- the general interface consistency (compare that with Windows Explorer, Windows Media Player, Avast! and each piece of crap^Wsoftware whose author believed developing yet another custom interface was the way to go).
Both points are what I call calm advantages, because users will usually enjoy them without noticing. Instead, they will enhance their experience so that they will miss them when they come back to a system which does not provide these features. In fact, being used to that, I do not really consider these points as actual advantages, but rather as a bare minimum for any decent desktop and as very important lacks of some competitors.
Uninstalling a single component of a meta-package
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line, To remember
Or how to get rid of Evolution without removing your whole system
There is a complain I have heard several times from people after they installed Debian: “I use Icedove/Thunderbird so I do not need Evolution: I tried to remove it but this would remove my whole system, that sucks!”