What I miss in GNOME

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>