GNOME is all about usability. And it used to take this to a point making many people angry. Still I loved this direction, because it prevented me from wasting too much time on toying around with settings that don’t really affect my productivity…

Today I’ve counted 37 entries in the settings menu. That is more than twice as many as should be there, IMHO… It makes me remember the settings chaos in kcontrol, where I often happen to know that the settings is somewhere and I just can’t find where…

Granted, many of them aren’t part of the GNOME core, for example two entries are Sun Java crap. Some policy tool I have no idea what it does, and a visually completely different dialog for the plugin. Or the art manager, a ruby application (why does it hide in settings?) to download themes from art.gnome.org.

There are tons of settings I’ve never even looked at, like the CD database server (probably defaults to freedb.org, and why would I want to change that?)

Yeah, I know… I should probably get some fresh Ubuntu install and look at the menu there, I bet it’s only half as big as mine here…