firefox file-open speed and other gnome rants

If you've ever had to ask firefox to open a file from a directory with lots of files, and find that it takes forever, go to about:config and then set ui.allow_platform_file_picker to false!

Some of the other comments flowing off of http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/278995/ae9fdab7c07b90d6/ are worth reading, from the point of view of a guy like me, who doesn't like Gnome.  Here are a few choice extracts, with URLs:

http://lwn.net/Articles/279398/ - My prolonged exposure to GNOME has resulted in apathy: I don't care about the desktop settings anymore. I guess it's inevitable. To caricaturize: if I like a setting, it's almost certainly gone in the next release, so there's no point to set oneself for disappointment

http://lwn.net/Articles/279345/ - From the brief and unpleasant interactions I've had with GNOME developers, I would conclude that they do not like their users. Well, I voted with my feet. XFCE for me, and my kids independently chose KDE after trying GNOME and KDE.

http://lwn.net/Articles/279449/ - [...]if you're not part of the GNOME Universe, you may as well not exist, which is the most objectionable aspect of GNOME anyway!

http://lwn.net/Articles/279420/ - I think they mostly like Microsoft's users, which is where a lot of the discontent comes from.  It's a lot easier to keep make-believe users that you don't really have happy than it is to please the ones that are actually using the software. As a result, features are added (and removed) that no-one actually requested.

And finally, an *excellent* analysis of why Nautilus is such a bad idea (or at least seems to have been done from the developers' point of view rather than the users'): http://lwn.net/Articles/279344/ (though this sort of stuff probably happens in KDE also, maybe to a lesser degree)