Re: Translations of folder names - two proposals

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, 2004-12-13 at 01:15 +0100, Jens Bech Madsen wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 12:01 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > Again, if there's no tradeoff between kinds of user then great, I agree
> > with your points. However if we have benefits for users like us on the
> > left, and benefits for Abby the office productivity worker on the right,
> > the two benefits being of approximately the same magnitude, then we
> > should lose.
> 
> Why?
> 
> Must everything be optimised for the least advanced user?
> 

It should be optimized for the target audience. Pages 184-185 in chapter
11 of "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" does a nice job pointing out
that the target audience is more "perpetual intermediate" than least or
most advanced, though the really key point is that a specific kind of
user has specific goals and the idea should be to design the software
around those goals.

The primary target audience of the GNOME project is not developers and
programmers and sysadmins. "The goal of the GNOME project: to create a
computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free
software" from http://foundation.gnome.org/about/charter/

Lots of developers and programmers and sysadmins use GNOME anyway,
because even though it isn't optimized for them necessarily, there's a
lot of value to using a "mainstream" desktop environment rather than
niche desktops aimed at the technical crowd. But lots of them also use
said niche desktops; there are dozens of open source desktops, many of
them tuned for technical professionals. There's nothing wrong with that,
it just isn't what GNOME is about.

We do have a ton of features specifically for
developers/programmers/sysadmins, and also many specifically for "people
who are used to UNIX" (traditionally termed "technical workstation
market"). We do a lot for these users. But they aren't the primary
objective.

Havoc