Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/what-i-miss-in-gnome.html
A while back there has been a lot of noise about the GNOME
“platform” and what GNOME 3.0 should be. Personally — while I
certainly like the progress GNOME makes as a “platform” — I must say
that the platform is already quite good. In my opinion, what is
lacking right now are more the tools and utilities that are shipped
*with* the GNOME platform than the platform itself. More specifically
there are a set of (rather small) tools I am really missing in the standard set of
GNOME tools. So, here’s my wishlist, in case anybody is interested to
know:
<wishlist>
- A simple, usable VNC/RFB client as counterpart to the VNC server
vino that has been shipped since early GNOME 2.0 times. Isn’t
it kind of awkward that we have been shipping a VNC server since ages,
but no VNC client? What I want is a client (maybe called
vinagre as a pun on vino) that is more than just a simple frontend to
xvncviewer, but not necessarily too fancy. Something that
integrates well into GNOME, i.e. uses D-Bus, gnome-keyring,
avahi-ui. There seems
to be a libvncclient library that might make the implementation of
this tool easy. - I am one of the (apparently not so few) people who run their GNOME
session with LANG=de_DE and LC_MESSAGES=C, which
enables german dates and everything else, but uses english
messages. Right now it’s a PITA to configure GNOME that way. It’s not
really documented how to do that, AFAIK. The best way to do this I
found is to edit ~/.gnomerc and set the variables in there. A
simple capplet which allows setting these environment variables from
gnome-session would be a much better way to configure
this. Nothing to fancy again. Just two drop down lists, to choose
LANG and LC_MESSAGES and maybe a subset of the other
i18n variables, and possibly G_FILENAME_ENCODING (although I
might be the only one who still hasn’t switched his $HOME to
UTF-8) - There’s no world clock in GNOME. Sure, there are online tools for
this, but I am not always online with my laptop. - There is no simple tool to take photo snapshots or record short videos
from webcams. I want to see something like camorama in
gnome-media. Nothing too fancy again. No filters, no TV
functionality. Just a small but useful GStreamer frontend. - I’d like to see a simple BitTorrent client shipped with GNOME, which is
integrated well into the rest of GNOME/Epiphany, so that downloading files from
FTP or HTTP looks exactly like downloading them from Bittorrent.
</wishlist>