GNOME Console Won’t Support Color Palettes or Profiles; Will Support Esperanto
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
GNOME is transitioning to a new terminal emulator called Console.
When I had GNOME, I had Console and GNOME Terminal installed, but I fixed everything so it would only open in Terminal, because Console wasn’t very good.
I figured that, maybe, they were just doing a code rewrite and planned to add the features later. Nope.
aday commented 10 hours ago
@orowith2os if there’s a reason you think that profiles or custom color palettes are needed, please provide a short statement of why. It’s best to stick to the practical issues!
(Personally, I don’t think that either of these features are desirable.)
– Fedora Issue Tracker
Looking over the development log, there WILL be a translation into Esperanto, which adds 449 lines to the program’s source code.
You almost have to wonder what the use for an Esperanto translation for GNOME is when they remove basic features, even from the Terminal.
Most people who are going to be intimidated by color palettes and multi-profile support will be far more intimidated by bash, which is not great for interactive use and in scripting, like everything GNU, makes up a bunch of non-POSIX crap just so people will use it and make damn sure their script isn’t portable to any other environment unless they go back and refactor it.
Also, between POSIX and bash, you’ve got enough situations where script code that looks “obviously correct” in fact goes off and does something horrible and idiotic instead. Also, fairly typical of GNU. “Obviously correct.” = Famous Last Words.
Anyway, I like to load the fish shell because it’s more pleasant for interactive use and much less prone to scripts that look good and then don’t actually work right.
This means that fish is not POSIX. I don’t care. If I need bashisms or POSIX, I’ll use a shebang for that script and call the appropriate shell. Or just run it in my user shell, which is still bash even though I don’t use bash.
I can change Konsole in KDE by telling it to use fish in my fish profile instead of bash, and opening that profile by default. If I need to switch to bash for a terminal tab, I can open a tab and type bash and hit enter.
Since GNOME Console doesn’t support loading a different shell, you have to do this by changing your user shell. Then there’s more risk of a compatibility problem because fish isn’t POSIX! People who want to use zsh or something are in more luck here.
So in my opinion, this is one more reason to get rid of GNOME.
This is happening, you will not change their minds. If you try, they’ll get really mean and either close the bug report, say you need to justify your use case (that’s their favorite), and/or say you were “impolite” and “CoC violation”, and ban your user account so they don’t have you reporting or commenting on things anymore.
Why deal with this mentality where they try to enforce their shitty defaults and then attack and slander and ban anyone who says, “Well what about that thing I could always do before?”.
Now I use Konsole, and if I want fish and a blue on black color palette, I will do that, fascists! LOL!
More on Esperanto.
Esperanto is a “constructed language” that nobody speaks natively and is not the official language of any country on Earth. It’s “synthetic” in that it was created pretty much in one go back in the 1800s as sort of a failed experiment in creating this “universal” backup language that everyone could learn as a second language. According to Wikipedia, there are estimated to be less than 2 million speakers of Esperanto as a second language on the entire planet, with over 8 billion people.
English is a fairly popular second language throughout the world. Even a lot of Chinese people, if they can afford to, try to make sure their children have a basic understanding of English, though the Communist government discourages it.
Wikipedia says that 372.9 million people speak English natively, but 1.08 billion speak it as a second language.
So there was never any real need for Esperanto and English has been a far more successful de facto second language.
In fact, in the Philippines, where my spouse is from, they have to fall back to it a lot anyway because there are like 11 different languages and it’s not a big country. So they end up resorting to using English with each other, a lot.
There’s been this effort to demonize the English language, which for centuries was one of the languages that meant “civilization” everywhere it was. Hey, if Captain Picard in Star Trek could say that about French, I can say it about English, and I’m not sorry. █