Formal complaint concerning the use of the name "System Settings" by GNOME

[Jeremy Bicha]

On 22 July 2011 17:17, Ben Cooksley <bcooksley at kde.org> wrote:
>>
>> Now lets go into something more productive and perhaps we can fix this
>> before the sunny Desktop Summit.
>
> Hi Olav,
>
> In terms of being productive surrounding this, I have several questions:
>
> Screenshots on your live wiki indicate that GNOME developers were
> aware of the use of the "System Settings" name by KDE. Why did your
> developers deliberately proceed with the use of this name, knowing it
> would cause a conflict? (This was the primary reason why I was
> particularly angry about the discovery of your use of this name)
>
> Is there any reason why it cannot be renamed once more as soon as is
> possible so that the next release your team makes fixes this issue?
>
> I would prefer to resolve this issue as soon as possible, to minimise
> the work packagers will inevitably do to block KDE System Settings
> under GNOME, and the resulting KDE application user support issues
> that will arise.
>
> Regards,
> Ben Cooksley
> KDE System Settings Maintainer

To be more specific about the problem, installing kde-workspace to a
GNOME installation results in 2 indistinguishable apps named System
Settings and 2 named System Monitor. On Ubuntu at least, if I want the
GNOME version, I have to remember to click the first System Monitor
but the second System Setting which is awfully frustrating. Here's a
screenshot from my Ubuntu install:
https://launchpadlibrarian.net/75745040/Gnome%20Shell%20screnshot.png

GNOME happily has the OnlyShowIn:Gnome,Unity key set for
gnome-control-center but KDE is unwilling to do the same because that
is the only way to change important preferences that affect KDE apps
in general.

I'd like to suggest that the GNOME developers consider changing the
public name of their app to "System Preferences." This matches the Mac
OS X design and arguably GNOME follows some parts of OS X design.
Furthermore, it is more in line with Gnome 2's System>Preferences and
System>Administration.

I suspect GNOME developers would rather users not install KDE apps,
but that's a narrow viewpoint. As one example, GNOME has no equivalent
to the educational suite that kdeedu provides.

I also don't think GNOME was intentionally malicious in choosing their
app's new name but it is creating an interoperability issue that ought
to be resolved.

Jeremy Bicha