Debian defaulted to GNOME when it installed, so I've been using GNOME for no good reason, although I've now got a good list of reasons never to recommend GNOME to anyone but the most masochistic.
I want to do the incredibly complicated task of "open file in a text editor and not a program that can't actually handle it."
Right Click on the file, try "Open With." Oops, the option I want (text editor) is listed twice. And neither work. Of course. So how do I remove these broken options?
Quick trip to Help, Contents. Nothing happens.
Hit F1. Nothing happens.
Hit F1 a bunch more. Nothing happens.
Finally, the GNOME help viewer crashes and several new ones pop up. Great.
Find a topic called "Assigning Actions to Files" - perfect! That's what I want to do. It tells you to use the "File Types and Programs" tool. There's just one problem with this:
The fucktards at GNOME removed that tool! It doesn't fucking exist any more!
So now it's time for a quick trip to Google, to search for where they relocated the ability to set file types. Simple search tells me they moved it to the now-broken "Open With" menu. Well, that's great. Too bad you can't change the default open action with "Open with"! Apparently telling Nautilus to use the correct program to open a file is considered too complicated and got removed.
But I find a post on the Debian mailing list asking where this slightly vital tool went. Well, obviously, into the File Properties dialog.
In order to edit the program that opens for a given file type (not the individual program file!) you must go through the incredibly intuitive step of right clicking on the file, choosing Properties, and selecting the Open With tab. This takes you to a completely different UI than is available through the Open With menu option on the damned file in the first place.
This UI allows you to remove the broken options. (But not, of course, edit them to fix them.) So after removing the broken options, I add back in the corrected variant, and select the proper program as the default.
I'm so glad they decided having a File Type manager was so complicated that it should instead be tied to the file and not the file type!
Unfortunately, of course, it turns out that the new action I added is, in fact, broken. And, in an effort to make everything "easy", is completely unfixable through the GNOME UI.
GNOME: Less useful, every day!