Re: My thoughts on fallback mode

["Jason D. Clinton" <me jasonclinton com>]

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 12:00, Holger Berndt <hb gnome org> wrote:

On Di, 04.01.2011 18:47, Gendre Sebastien wrote:

>Le mardi 04 janvier 2011 à 16:27 +0100, Holger Berndt a écrit :
>> As it puts your posts into context, you could have mentioned that
>> you're actually the maintainer of Sawfish. In all of your posts in
>> this
>> thread, I don't hear a concerned user, but an annoyed WM developer,
>> angry that the GNOME Shell doesn't work with his "baby".
>>
>> That also explains why your perception of the amount of users who want
>> to replace their WM differs from others. I'm absolutely sure that you,
>> as Sawfish maintainer, know a lot of users of Sawfish and other 3rd
>> party WMs. I doubt that you're representative for the general GNOME
>> user base, though.
>>
>> Non-IT users don't know what a WM is. They don't want to know, and if
>> they need to know what it is and how to replace it, something is
>> broken in the first place, and work should be spent on fixing
>> the problems instead of abstracting them.
>
>Please, if you have no good arguments, don't try to marginalize and make
>personal atttak on people with whom you are desagree.

I'm not personally attacking people with whom I disagree. I just
described where the different perception of how many users want to
replace their WM might come from. Which is quite a central point when
discussing whether it's hugely important to be WM agnostic, or not.

Let me add, with my Marketing Team hat on, that we would *never* emphasis the modularity of any part of GNOME as a feature to be marketed to end users. Even if you look back through our release notes from past releases all the way back to 2.0, we have never shown off the modularity of the desktop. It's not a narrative that makes sense from a marketing perspective. It would be like releasing a new car and then telling the buyer that the tires that are included aren't good enough but that's okay because they are free to go through the trouble of replacing them right after they take ownership. Modularity is not a feature; a good feature is a feature.

If a user has to do a bunch of customization after installing to get a tolerable desktop experience, we have failed at design. We are finally addressing that and that is one of the many reasons that I love GNOME Shell.