Re: GNOME 2.23 Schedule

["Peteris Krisjanis" <pecisk gmail com>]

2008/3/17, Felipe Contreras <felipe contreras gmail com>:
> On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 11:25 PM, Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> wrote:
>  >
>  >
>  >  On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 23:22 +0200, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>  >  > On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 9:36 PM, Ross Burton <ross burtonini com> wrote:
>  >  > > On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 20:50 +0200, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>  >  > >  > Still the input from the user-base is not considered?
>  >  > >  >
>  >  > >  > How much a simple most-wanted-feature poll could hurt?
>  >  > >
>  >  > >  Do the poll entries come with patches attached?  If there is a feature
>  >  > >  missing then file a bug and either wait for someone else to code it, pay
>  >  > >  someone to code it, or code it yourself.
>  >  >
>  >  > I find it difficult to achieve the 10x10 goal without knowing what the
>  >  > users really want.
>  >
>  >  Actually, we already know what users want. We're missing people
>  >  implementing it though...
>
>
> Good, is there a list of those features?
>

I am getting tired from this myth. Duh. As usual, "what users want" is
simple slogan, but in real life, everything is much more difficult.

What actually users want? What are these users? Current KDE/Windows/OS
X users? Which feature is best for them? Or we are talking about happy
GNOME users here who probably would like us to continue incremental
updates, just with bigger workforce?

As user support guy for 10 years, I would say - that is nonsense.
There are two groups of users - first one is users who don't care
about features, they want to have them there, right in their desktop.
You offer them feature set, they use it. But if you will ask them what
they lack in their desktop, you won't get clear answer. That is why we
have professional GUI and desktop user studies for, because they
analyze user behavior and understand what they expect, _without_
asking directly to user.

And yes, you will never poll this group rightly unless you have some
miracle screen which shows each such GNOME user. They are many, but
they are very, very random.

And another group is superusers, who want everything and nothing -
they requirements are very specific and usually they take their part
in bug reporting and even providing patches (when they want to fix app
they love/use much). They can be polled though on many arch. aspects,
including such changes as gvfs, pulseaudio, integration stuff. But
that will be very specific.

To summarize this, GNOME ain't Windows and we ain't Microsoft. We
don't and probably will never have budget to have huge marketing
studies about what users want. Microsoft thosed tons of money to
investigate new interface for Office - and it still have made lot of
users mad. So I suggest not to try to waste our time to this.

What we need though is make a simple plan of everyday usage of
computer - and see in which places we lack features, maybe somewhere
only low hangin fruits lay and where integration (like now we have few
clicks file encryption on desktop) would make GNOME users digital
life's much easier.

p.s. I would like to see Gnome Scan in next release :)

Just my two cents,
Peter.