I have always been interested in computers, and would find myself hanging out with the Computer Science students instead of the Aviation Management or Business Management students I was a part of. At home and at work I have been largely self-teaching myself using computers starting with Excel and Access with VBA through ASP and SQL at work. Thankfully my current employer values education, and so I have been taking classes and not only learning the technology, but un-learning what I have been doing wrong over the years. At home, though, I have been teaching myself Linux, system administration, networking and the overall method of migrating our system from Windows to Linux. I am involved in the Danbury Area Computer Society (DACS.org) I have the opportunity to take what I've learned the hard way and hopefully help others.. I have been enjoying Open Source for a while now, and I am hoping to get a better understanding of the entire model and application.
Authored Comments
I think one of the few criticism I have with Gnome is the lost screen real estate that Gnome produces with the top panel, the title bar of the window (even full-sized) and then the toolbar. It is a lot of wasted space that Unity and OS X addressed by allowing the menu bar to move to the top panel. There is also an extension that hides the title bar when the window is full-screen so these options are helpful.
Extensions are a big bonus to Gnome. It provides a lot of features that I like, and I have a handful of ones I regularly install. I also found one extension developer help me when his didn't work quite right on my system, so that is a "Community for the win!" situation.
Your mention of being someone
"...who enjoys tinkering and theming, it's important that I can customize the visuals to suit my tastes.
Thankfully, installing themes in GNOME is easy."
This is a criticism I have for both Gnome and KDE. I remember fondly of years ago when you could change the panel's transparency, or color or even replace the color with an image, yourself. Now you need to go and find somebody's theme to do that, and get all the rest that comes with that.
Xfce is the only desktop I've used that allows that level of customization!
Overall, Gnome is good though. Don't get me wrong. It looks alright and works alright. For the most part it is stable and some of the eye candy is a hindrance rather than a nicety. This is probably due to my using old hardware.
Still, this article is a nice read! Enjoyed it.
I like the list of project ideas. A good way to get people thinking along those lines and adapt to their own tastes.