Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit
Collabora
Productivity a subsidiary of Collabora focusing on LibreOffice support and
services for whom I work.
Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlighten
yourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or if
you are feeling objectionable perhaps here.
Failing that, there are all manner of interesting things to read on
the LibreOffice Planet news
feed.
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Up early, mail chew, built ESC bug stats & proto agenda,
plugged away at slideware. Upgraded over lunch to openSUSE 13.1, coming
soon. Set about trying to restore my system to usability:
- Impatience
extension is obsolete - unclear how to get
rid of the annoying animations I don't want for crisp cuts.
Apparently re-installing it made it 'just work' which is
great - though some vestiges of animations are sadly left
even in the best case.
- Workspace
Grid apparently disappeared without trace or replacement,
attempted to install an unwanted frippery bottom panel, and
got some 2D-ness, with no keybindings and an unwanted panel.
Un-installed and re-installed the workspace grid extension
several times to no avail, with no sensible error reporting.
Kindly pointed
to Bitbucket
and worked out what to
hg clone in the end, built
it, and gnome-tweak-tool failed to give any error / notification
as it didn't install it; filed some bugs.
} After an hour+ of time burn (all of it GNOME related, openSUSE 13.1
seems rather good), I nearly gave up. Then started poking in
~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions, filed a dconf-editor / gtk3
crasher (BadAlloc). Chewed another quarter of an hour trying to debug and
port the 2D workspace grid before giving up on that, three sets of API churn
down. The software may not be where I'd like it but the community on IRC
is really friendly and helpful. Now where ? Tried installing gnome-shell and
mutter from 12.3 on top, not working. Installed metacity & gnome-panel -
enjoyed the wonderful (perhaps psychosomatic) improvement in responsiveness
from metacity, but no mouse pointer, and (somehow) busted 2D desktops there
too: wow.
-
Tried to get back to the old system, the lack of option to boot it
is no doubt an artifact of some grub2 vs. grub, migration in
openSUSE 13.1. Marvelled at the complexity of the grub2 config file and
gave up trying to resurrect my old partition.
-
Back to trying to fix the GNOME javascript to get 2D workspaces going,
commented out a lot more API change / breakage, to no avail; what now ?.
After my experience trying out Alt-` for a week, I can't afford to sink more
time into learning to enjoy being trapped in a thin vertical workspace.
-
Installed XFCE. A couple of configuration tweaks later (it clearly
has too many options) it did nearly what I wanted, albeit with it's own
frustrations. It also seems snappier
[ vs. the 'Impatience' set to zero equivalent ]. Very sad. What I saw of GNOME
3.10 looked lovely; I love GNOME, I like the minimal design, I'm prepared to
put up with the control center moving settings around between releases like
a drunken madman, and re-learning the strangely new positions / arrangements
of the panel / app-launcher etc. each release - that stuff is all low
frequency usage - a few times per day. However for app / workspace
switching, which is a hundreds of times per hour experience, changing my
existing wetware is (pragmatically) -much- too expensive to change. I havn't
the time to invest in making GNOME 3.10 what I need today, and I can't get back
to 3.8 which is annoying more than words can express. Hopefully eventually someone
will make the Workspace Grid extension work & I can move back over the next
months; that is until 3.12 changes the gnome-shell extension APIs again.
-
Hopefully the new Evolution 3.10 (which fixes all known problems vs. 3.8)
makes all this pain worth suffering; lets see, early signs are good - and it's
great to be on a release worth reporting bugs / fixing things against. Good to
read about the rendering improvements in gtk 3.10 too.
-
Out for a run. Dinner; Bible study with Arun, worked until 2am
making up the lost time - not good.
My content in this blog and associated images / data under
images/ and data/ directories are (usually)
created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under
the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0
license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for
themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes /
improvements / corrections by private mail.
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my
own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE,
Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International),
or anyone else.
It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy.
Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences
or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@collabora.com)
