CrunchBang Linux

ferefe

New Member

Registered: 2009-06-21

Posts: 1

Hello, I love #! so here's some criticism.

I'm new here, and on the internet discussion forums in general, so let me say just this once how great it feels to be a (minuscule) part of the #! community and a happy user. I won't go into praise for all the hard work and clever design decisions corenominal (and I don't yet know who else) done, I can't help but feel inspired by them, so let me cut straight to the chase and offer some (hopefully constructive) criticism. 

It's great that you've made it possible to go straight to config files from the menu, but shouldn't it invoke editor, x-www-browser, terminal-emulator and other apps from /etc/alternatives (man update-alternatives)? It would default to Thunar and Gedit and Terminator and whatever else we've got hard-coded into menus, but would at the same time allow to change all the default apps (and system behaviour!) once and for all, providing much more smooth and pleasant ride.

There's nowhere to change keyboard setting from inside openbox, even though changes made in the course of installation or from inside Gnome session stay in effect. It's confusing, though obviously possible, to deal with and change the default panel application and setting. Sure, that's already all over the forums and wiki, but wouldn't it be easier to take care of that before releasing distro in the wild?

I'm yet to figure out how the gtk, xfce, gnome2 and openbox settings get read and applied together. That's also obviously within the grasp of determined tinkerer, but quite confusing. I'd really appreciate it if somebody helped me reveal locations, order and precedence of configuration files. Is there a single right approach? How should I go about isolating and disentangling complex behaviour of a live system?

Drop-down menus on the login screen are clunky and show up empty at first. I've run into several small but annoying misbehaviours on ui widgets' part, again, I'd love to help get them fixed -- if you've any idea how can I go about it, please tell me.

Conky has incredibly powerful conditional statements, if only they were shown in the default config, many more people would use them. By the way of example, I've set mine to

${if_running wireshark}
${color blue}
WIRELESS:
${hr}
${wireless_ap wlan0}
${wireless_mode wlan0}
${wireless_link_bar wlan0}
${upspeedgraph wlan0 "log" 20 red black}
${else}
SHORTCUT KEYS:
${hr}
... 

I just assume that you're going to make openbox menu more dynamic in the future.

There are little improvements over (already almost standard) end-user-oriented linux distro architecture, such as ephemeral over-the-net software installs or firefox optimized for linux some of which would not add to the complexity, but fit into (what I assume to be) #! design philosophy.  Althrough, in all honesty, it would be far more useful to get straight all the mess with wireless, sound, localization, and what else, that accompanies all the goodness of debian and ubuntu heritage.

So there. I apologize in advance if this sounds ignorant or offensive to any of you, even though these discussion forums are really not my thing, I'm willing to learn, I'm willing to participate in whatever work there is in the community.

anonymous

The Mystery Member

From: Arch Linux Forums

Registered: 2008-11-29

Posts: 9,418

Re: Hello, I love #! so here's some criticism.

Welcome to forum ferefe and if you don't mind, Id like to comment on some of your suggestions.

It's great that you've made it possible to go straight to config files from the menu, but shouldn't it invoke editor, x-www-browser, terminal-emulator and other apps from /etc/alternatives (man update-alternatives)? It would default to Thunar and Gedit and Terminator and whatever else we've got hard-coded into menus, but would at the same time allow to change all the default apps (and system behaviour!) once and for all, providing much more smooth and pleasant ride.

I think this would be a good idea at least for x-www-browser and terminal-emulator.

I don't know if editor can be configured for a GUI app though. For me, it launches nano.

There's nowhere to change keyboard setting from inside openbox

Indeed. If you want a program to change keyboard and mouse settings, you can add this PPA:

https://launchpad.net/~ulite/+archive/nemo

Then install lxinput

I'm yet to figure out how the gtk, xfce, gnome2 and openbox settings get read and applied together. That's also obviously within the grasp of determined tinkerer, but quite confusing. I'd really appreciate it if somebody helped me reveal locations, order and precedence of configuration files. Is there a single right approach? How should I go about isolating and disentangling complex behaviour of a live system?

Well heres a brief explanation of Openbox's config files.

~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh - contains items to be launched on login
~/.config/openbox/menu.xml - for Openbox menu
~/.config/openbox/rc.xml - contains Openbox settings such as fonts, keybindings, etc.

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