when did I become a gnome weenie?

Somewhere along the line, I've gone from dsliking gnome, to considering it and kde as uninteresting equals, to grudging respect, to using it by default on everything except my personal work boxes (which use ion, of course).

Today I spent a couple of hours tweaking a sarge install and gnome desktop on a "new" machine, that will eventually be used my Maggie and my Mom. I only encountered one crash (or rather, failure to start) and one small bug. I found out that sound-juicer is rather nice as a CD ripper for newbies, and the gnome media platyer thing works find with reasonable sets of music (unlike my typically more unreasonable sets).

The only truely annoying thing was that this machine has a low res screen, and many gnome dialogs were cut off at the bottom. And gnome still can't seem to keep windows above the panel at the bottom of the screen all the time. Of course as an ion user, I'm not used to needing to worry about crap like moving windows around and keeping all of them visible.

But it was overall just fun to set up, try to anticipate their needs and make it easy for them to find what they want, and the result is quite attractive, and performs suprisingly well on a machine that was literally gleft on my doorstep for free.

(Also, update to my machine naming policy -- machines that are not in my house shall be named after flying creatures. Oddly all the machines I've already named that arn't at home fit this policy already. So the repurposed earthworm has become a sparrow.)