The GNOME decadence thread got me thinking. What does GNOME give me? (I consider myself a hardcore UNIX user). Well… it gives a nice interface with a nice terminal implementation (gnome-terminal). Further more with the recent Ubuntu 8.04, it also provides

  • PulseAudio, never got that working btw, went back to ALSA.
  • Tracker, what the hell was ever wrong with locate? Never got that working, and when I did, it was dog slow.
  • I should be using evolution for emailing… no thanks! I’m a happy mutt user.
  • There is no support for VI-key bindings in GTK… (which is not gnome’s fault, but irritating none the less)

So I purged GNOME from my system and started using Xmonad, a tiling window manager. I’m still using GTK applications, because most of them still rule. But I’m happy that I’m leaving this whole GNOME business behind.