578. More Gnome issues -- semi-rant

I was able to get on with work in spite of transitioning to gnome 3 -- but only thanks to the frippery extensions:
http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/debian-testing-64-bit-gnome-3gnome.html 
http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/402-very-briefly-what-i-forgot-about.html

And then gnome-screenshot got crippled, but I managed to cope with that by patching it:
http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/fixing-gnome-screenshot-341-in-debian.html

I'm using debian testing (jessie) on my laptop and since I normally don't do much on it other than occasionally log into work to check on jobs I have been able to ignore the issues that are so apparent in gnome 3.12, two of which are:

*  gnome-terminal doesn't have a transparent background option since ersion 3.8 -- instead of being able to read what's underneath (e.g. a blog post with a how-to), and thus making good use of the screen real estate, my laptop screen is now feeling very, very small.

[And the developer seems to have the usual gnome attitude issue: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=698544 ]

gnome-terminal 3.12

 There's basically nothing that has forced me to stay with gnome-terminal, so switching terminals was a simple matter of installing xfce4-terminal instead, which looks pretty much like gnome-terminal used to. Besides, I use guake more of the time anyway.

xfce4-terminal

 * you can't resize 'native' gnome programs, such as nautilus, that are in full-screen mode. Well, you can -- by holiding super (i.e. windows button) + down arrow. But the icons in the top right corner are no longer, and I find that incredibly annoying.

Nautilus. Nautilus shows when dropbox is synced -- thunar doesn't.

Thunar -- like nautilus of days gone by

 There are two things that I need from nautilus (other than working as a filemanager, of course, and allowing me to open terminals where I want which is something thunar supports 'out of the box') -- the ability to batch resize images, and dropbox. Now, dropbox has nothing to do with nautilus and the dropbox server will run happily in the background whether you're using a file manager or not. It would be nice if thunar would show whether the dropbox folder is synced or not, but it's hardly crucial.

Image resizing is a different matter since we maintain our own little website with personal photos for overseas members of our families. Ergo, it's crucial.

Luckily, this is pretty easy:

sudo apt-get install simple-image-reducer

Go to Edit/Configure custom actions... and set command to simple-image-reducer %F, and scope to apply to images, as shown in the screenshots.

I'm sure there are lots of other small issues in gnome 3.12 that I either keep missing or wilfully ignore in the interest of maintaining a low blood pressure. The whole idea of removing features that are actually useful with no way of re-enabling them smacks of 'we know better than you', and that irks me.