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

[Shaun McCance]

On Fri, 2011-07-22 at 17:53 -0400, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
> 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 very much doubt users will be any less confused when confronted
with "System Settings" and "System Preferences". We should work on
shared groundwork so that our settings are interoperable. If a user
has to set his language in two different applications just because
he happens to use applications written in two different toolkits,
we have failed miserably.

However, if the here-and-now requires this duplication, then I don't
think it's right for any application to use a generic name outside
its target desktop. Having the KDE System Settings show up as just
"System Settings" under GNOME is confusing to GNOME users. Just as
it would be confusing if I made Yelp show up as "Help" in KDE.

There's a very easy way to use a different application name under
different desktops. Just install two .desktop files. One looks
like this:

Name=System Settings
OnlyShowIn=KDE

The other looks like this:

Name=KDE System Settings
NotShowIn=KDE

You just can't expect to own generic names across desktops.

--
Shaun