Re: Request for breakage in gnome-panel

["Larry W. Virden" <lvirden cas org>]

From: Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>

> we
> don't actually inflict enough pain on them.  What we do is leave
> band-aids and warts lying around so we ourselves can pretend that our
> desktop is good because people are able to get by.  Instead of clearing
> those nasty things off the table and actually facing our *real*
> problems.  

:
:

> Obviously it's not necessary to cause pain to realize what we need to
> do, most people have ideas of what we need to do.  But the pain is about
> getting everyone to see where we are failing and focusing what we need
> to do to succeed instead of letting everyone find hacks around our
> failures.

I know that in the gnome community I am trying to build, the users
are non-developers; people who need to get a job done, quickly and
efficiently.  And the perception of gnome they have now is mixed.
They are used to getting their job done under OpenWindows.  There
were certainly lots of frustrations there.  When we looked at
CDE, and how nightmareish trying to set up user defined menu entries,
default login desktops, etc. we basically stalled until cde went
away on our sparc environments.

However, now gnome is crashing towards us like an elephant through
the bush.  And so we began the process of trying to hand hold hundreds
of users through the trauma of switching desktops.  And consistently
what we hear are things like "Why can't we ..." , "We used to be able
to do this under OpenWindows; why can't we now..." with the occasional
"Wow, that's great!"

The biggest incentive for people to quit using a GNOME desktop, and move
to Windows, is arbitrary, caprious changing of the user desktop for no
good reason to the users.  Rather than people guessing this is what
users want or need, it seems to me that actually talking to cross sections
of a wide variety of users might provide accurate models of what people
need and want.
-- 
Tcl - The glue of a new generation.  <URL: http://wiki.tcl.tk/ >
Larry W. Virden <mailto:lvirden cas org> <URL: http://www.purl.org/NET/lvirden/>
Even if explicitly stated to the contrary, nothing in this posting should 
be construed as representing my employer's opinions.
-><-