Re: [Usability]Definition of "desktop" - was a Usability topic.

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 02:28:51PM -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
> 
> GNOME is, however, developed in isolation. It's one thing if 'ls' has no
> branding, but if a project of several million lines of code does not
> effectively convey to users 'here is who we are, here is why you should
> help us' then we're going to be 100% dependent on vendors very, very
> quickly. That would be an utter shame. [FWIW, I don't think the menu is
> the right place to do this, necessarily, but it's something we have to
> think about very hard going forward. If GNOME's identity is to be just
> 'something that gets packaged with a distro', we've got very little
> long-term future as a community. And that would be an utter shame.]
> 

A valid issue. I'm just not sure menus are the right place for this.

A real problem with naming UI elements "GNOME foo" is that it's
extremely hard to explain to an end user what "GNOME" is. Because the
line between "GNOME" and "the OS" is pretty much something you have to
start talking about executables and shared objects in order to
explain. I've seen plenty of users on mailing lists who are plainly
confused about where the line is.

Frankly the line is changing pretty often over time...  it's an
organizational line, not an a priori line or a line that necessarily
makes a ton of sense.

An immediate step we could take is to link to www.gnome.org in the
about dialog, for example. I know I learned about free software from
the "about GNU" stuff in Emacs.

Havoc