Of course SuSE fixed it

[music | nine inch nails - eraser]

Not without some seriously non-typical end user junk, but giving up on installing dependencies myself after seeing control-center2 relying on nautilus, and nautilus relying on control-center2, I installed using YAST and it worked fine. I know I should have forced around the dependencies, but please, someone...

So that got me the control center, from which I could change my GTK2 app fonts to look normal, which worked. Tell me Aunt Tillie is going to do that. I use Linux because it stays out of my way and gives me a ton of tools and display options. I have done this for a long, long time. My mom would be unwilling to do what it takes to achieve the one-true-display. I probably won't touch another thing until these monitors die and I have to (or get to, glass half full) change my res again. But really, if anyone ever tries to make a case for Linux on the average home desktop, make that easier.

Sure, it's easy to change res, but if you are going from 2048x1536 on a CRT all the way down to 1600x1200 on LCD, you can bet that all your font and display settings are fubared. Knowing where to look is only half the problem. If I was an average user I wouldn't know that, as a KDE user, I can change my KDE settings all day and not affect Firefox or GIMP. I wouldn't know that I had to install gnome-control-center2 to fuck with the display settings there to change those apps.

It's not just a multi-DE environment issue, it's a general complexity rant. KDE control center is somewhat easy to use, but it's not as simple as the "control panel" paradigm, and it certainly isn't as straight-forward (for many cases) as the OSX settings applet, with ALL options displayed always by default. None of this expecting your mom to dig down through menus. GNOME has the right idea on that minor point, but unfortunately it's an unusable DE for anyone who is an absolute control freak about how they work. I would contend that it's an unusable DE for anyone else too, but that's just an opinion I guess.