Apple-fying your software doesn’t work if you don’t control the hardware. Or the users.
John Poelstra doesn’t like that Gnome 3 suspends the computer when you close the lid of your laptop, and there’s no way to configure that behaviour.
Well, there’s no way to configure it in the GUI, which is basically the same thing.
Poelstra has this to say:
This is going too far. I’ve never liked the suspend-on-close behavior, but I tolerate it on the MacBook because suspend always resumes. Apple is in the unique position of fully controlling the software and a finite amount of hardware. GNOME and the Linux kernel are not.
He quotes Allan Day, a Gnome Design Team member:
The vast majority of people do not like lots of settings: they find them difficult to use, and it makes them think that GNOME isn’t intended for them.
You know what makes a given piece of software feel like it’s not intended for me? If it only works in one way, and I don’t like that way, and I can’t change that way. That software feels like it was designed for use by UX designers. Or Apple users.
I have nothing against Apple or its users, but Apple’s products are designed to do the things that Apple thinks I should want them to do, not the things I actually want them to do, so I choose not to use them.
The stupid thing is, I started digging into all this because I agree with the UX designers that suspend-on-close is a good, sensible default behaviour. I just think the hibernate-on-close is better for me. And I had to dig deep to find a way to do that, because somewhere along the way, the UX designers started running the asylum and turned sensible defaults into “optimal behaviour”.
The commands for setting laptop lid closing behaviour in Fedora are here.
