Re: GNOME now

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2012 13:33:26 +0000
Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:

> hi;
> 
> On 28 November 2012 11:02, Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk> wrote:
> >> What I took from that is that the freedom to modify your computing
> >> environment is only meaningful in the first degree to programmers.
> >
> > And if GNOME continues to bury all the configuration in secret corners
> > without a UI, and even the basic stuff only by an add on (tweak tool)
> > you'll continue to fail to empower users to modify their computing
> > environment.
> 
> yes, because we all know that Freedom means Tweaking configuration
> options, or *having* to modify your environment in order for it to
> work.

Freedom means having the ability to do these things. Enhancing the
freedom of users means giving them the ability to do these things if they
wish.

Nothign to do with having to modify your environment and you know it.

> having options everywhere in your face and in your UI is not
> empowering anyone: let's drop this fallacy.

There is a difference between having options in your face and being able
to find them as a non-technical user.

At the end of the day the market size for "people who agree exactly with
the Gnome defaults" is smaller than "people who kind of like it but want
to tweak a couple of things". Our way or the highway doesn't work very
well with UI. I'm surprised the fact that there's only one distribution
of note still defaulting to Gnome 3  hasn't woken people up a bit more.

Alan