Re: My thoughts on fallback mode

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

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 12:25, Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk> wrote:

> 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.

You wouldn't be a very good car salesman then would you ? In fact people
loathe and hate the lock-ins wired into cars.

Please do not be hyperbolic; we aren't locking anyone in to anything except, in this analogy, saying that putting a Hemi engine in a sub-compat is outside the scope of our design goals.

 

Plus of course the first
thing anyone does when they get into a car is umm

       Adjust the mirros
       Adjust the seats
       Adjust the music
       Adjust the airconditioning
       Adjust the satnav
       Fit random personal objects (modularity)
       ...

That's personalization, not customization, and is completely within the scope of will be implemented in GNOME 3: themes, backgrounds, localization, a11y, favorite launch items, etc. And has been said before, that's just the beginning: by 3.2 we hope to have a well-defined extension API so that even more *personalization* is possible.

"I'd like to use a random bluetooth hands free", "sorry our car is only
available with our official hands free option"

"radio", "ours only"

"satnav", "ours only"

"engine management", "ours only, DRM protected and we sued the other guys"

"I need snow tyres", "sorry we don't support snow tyres, you don't need
them."

"I added go faster stripes" "You've voided the warranty"

The car market is such a mind-numbingly bad example, in fact it's the very
market whose abuse led the european union to pass legislation to limit
the power of "no reverse engineering" clauses, that later proved such a
good situation for software !

Fine, pick another analogy then. You got my point and now you're just going off on a rant about cars.

 

> If a user has to do a bunch of customization after installing to get
> a tolerable desktop experience, we have failed at design.

If the user can't then customise it to get a nice desktop experience to
suit their needs after that you've also failed. That of course cuts both
ways - it can have so much stuff you can't configure it.

You appear to have missed my point: if it's not a nice desktop experience to begin with, it's too late. We are working on *that*, not asking the user to do it for us.

 

The distros gather hardware info with permission from plenty of users so
they ought to be able to answer "what percentage of our users can run
this stuff".

"Anything newer than 5 years old." Though we started saying that last Spring so it's going to be 6 years old by the time we release this Spring--which is longer than I've kept any computer.

 

Not sure if they have enough data to do "what portion of our
users desktops can be seamlessly migrated - ie all the equivalents for
each applet exist and the settings can be mapped"

None, and that's a completely unrealistic expectation. We don't change the UI paradigm and expect things to behave as they always have; that would be by its very definition be the same paradigm.