[ale] gnome desktop: icon size control

[Tim Watts]

Hi,

I'm setting up a Gnome desktop for a friend who likes to collect all her 
pictures, docs etc. on the desktop. That's fine except that the thumbnail 
icons (jpeg, bmp & pdf) are unreasonably large (about 1" square). Is there a 
way to control the size as a general policy -- other than turning off 
thumbnails? I see how I can do this on a case by case basis but that's not 
good enough. (This is on ubuntu jaunty.)

== BEGIN RANT ==
BTW, I got started on this when she asked me if I could look into why her 
laptop spontaneously shuts down several times a day -- usually while in the 
middle of capturing some thoughts for her business. It's running vista so I 
wasn't terribly surprised to hear this. What I wasn't prepared for was how 
UNBELIEVABLY BAD this OS is. (I'm pretty confident it's not a hardware problem 
-- batteries are good, no viruses found (sigs up to date), no serious hardware 
alerts etc. This is reinforced by the fact that it's been running linux off a 
flash drive for over 24 hrs with no problems -- writing on the ntfs 
partitions, wireless internet, yada, yada...) It's been a while since I've had 
to deal with a windows machine and my dealings with vista have mostly been 
from my armchair. I guess I'm lucky. So you'll pardon me if I just can't get 
over the fact that Linux is the free OS while windows it the one people pay 
for. It just makes no sense. Vista is bad from so many viewpoints: usability, 
stability, security, speed, resource consumption... But it is shiney, I will 
give you that.

Let's start with security and the endless popups where windows asks you if 
it's ok to perform an action you just asked it to perform because it's not 
really sure YOU asked it to perform it. What!? So it can't acertain the origin 
of a mouse click but it's going to use a mouse click to decide whether to 
proceed. If you were writing malware wouldn't you naturally send a button-
click message to the dialog? Even if they made it difficult to get the window 
handle, what about popup fatigue? A basic interaction design priciple says 
that to make popups effective, avoid using them. So this popup strategy is no 
security at all but shameless CYA. Mind you, these popups aren't isolated to 
"commit" actions (in fact, all the commit action popups I saw appeared to be 
normal parts of the application). Just *opening* the Event Viewer will trigger 
one.

Each time I booted the machine, the system was unusable for 15 minutes AFTER 
the desktop appeared, no lie. A lot of this seemed to be because the internet 
connection hadn't been established -- but I couldn't establish it because the 
system was thrashing.

I suspect much of the instability she experiences comes from the fact that she 
(probably unknowingly) never shuts the system down but rather puts it to 
sleep. I've never had a good experience with windows hibernate on any system 
(but very good with Ubuntu on my Dell). I say "unknowingly" because the button 
you would expect to shutdown the system doesn't do that and you'd only notice 
this if you paid attention to the tool tip (but why would you? you know an off 
button when you see one, right?). I don't know if this is a customization on 
her part (doubtful), the OEM (Acer) or just standard vista behaviour, but it's 
a poor choice. And given the lengthy startup/shutdown time for a full vista 
boot/shutdown I can imagine why someone opted for this little deception.

Resource consumption: the vista footprint on her system is about 17GB. Her 
personal data and software is less than 5. The hard drive light almost never 
stopped during any given session (and no i/o error / controller events in the 
logs).

Speed: I downloaded a large file (~700MB). Windows initial estimate was 198 
hours (don't tell me stupid shit when you know it's just plain stupid) but 
finally settled at around 51 minutes. However, we'll never know how accurate 
it was because it could never finish the job. The furthest it got along was 
around 10MB. But it aways hung. Same file, same machine, same network under 
linux: completed the job in a little over 40 minutes.

Bear in mind this machine has not been a sand box for endless software 
experiments. Basically, she has QuickBooks and some flash-based courseware 
installed (that's going to be a problem, linux-wise). I could go on but I'm 
really more interested in an answer to my original question. I do feel about 
10 pounds lighter, however. Thanks for listening if you read this far.

Well ok one last thing: in fairness, a lot of Gnome/KDE stuff has a few miles 
to go in the usability arena. And I've had X go ballistic a few times. So I'm 
not trying to claim that the linux desktop is some kind of utopia. But 
stability?, speed?, security? Linux all the way!

== END RANT ==


-- 
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
 -- Abraham Lincoln