Re: GNOME user survey 2011

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On 1 August 2011 11:20, Christophe Fergeau <teuf gnome org> wrote:
> Once again, I think things will go this way, we run the poll, maybe 1%
> of gnome users answer, N% of these respondants answer X, and then
> we'll get people saying "N% of GNOME users want X, upstream ignore
> their users!"

To upstream maintainers, even a "user survey" telling us to do X, Y or
Z is probably going to be ignored. Users don't know what they want[1].

Richard.

[1] A very popular request in gnome-power-manager is a command to be
executed when the brightness keys are pressed, which allows vendors to
hook up custom notifications, and people using odd proprietary drivers
to execute crazy stuff like nvclock or radeontool to actually poke
semi-random numbers into hardware registers using a setuid script.
This means we then have n*n*n hardware interactions, on the assumption
that the hardware already has n*n ways of notifying userspace
[hw+changed, changed, hw, neither].
What the user really wants is brightness control to "just work", which
involves making the xorg driver vendors implement either XBACKLIGHT or
the drm driver just to add a standard sysfs backlight class device,
which means that no hacky code is required at all. It's really hard to
write a kernel or xserver patch, but it means that stuff just works,
and gives us a platform we can realistically support.