Re: [gnome-love] Re: [Nautilus-list] GNOME user environmentbrainstorming

[Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik Sun COM>]

On Mon, 28 May 2001, Christian Rose wrote:

> > I *DO* *NOT* speak for Sun. I absolutely don't speak for anybody but me on
> > any usability issue - I just refuse to have a special yahoo.com (or
> > similar) account to talk about these. Rest asures, whenever I'm talking
> > for myself but som other entity (whichever that is), the text will be
> > labeled as such.
> 
> I don't think you need a disclaimer. My Sun example was, well, an
> example scenario. You can replace it with any other made-up scenario
> with a packager that wants to have defaults that are better suited for
> their users, and maybe with some advanced features enabled by default. I
> just thought it fit very well.
> I still think it's up to the packager to choose suitable defaults if
> they need something else than what GNOME comes with. Most GNOME users
> will get their GNOME from a packager of some sort anyway.
> 

uh-uh... That *UTTERLY* defeats the point of having any kind of UI
guidlines if in the end, nobody makes any use of it and ships their own
thing. I am not impartial to chaos but I don't think utterly fragmenting
UI landscape of GNOME would be a good thing.

> 
> > Yes, I did mention CDE (which, welcome to the real world, isn't Sun
> > specific anyways), but you could replace it with any other legacy/alternative
> > desktop (like say XFCE) that has easily available multiple desktops in
> > it's place.
> 
> You mentioned CDE defaults and users switching from CDE, and I have the

No, I mentioned users going "back" (in the evolutionary, not migratory
sense) to CDE. CDE is also far from the only desktop which has the
capability of multiple desktops and offers it by deafult. 

> feeling that Sun will be trying to make the CDE -> GNOME switch as easy
> as possible for their users. Another reason I chose Sun as an example.
> Maybe HP is working on that too, I don't know. Ximian would be a bad
> example, I have the feeling that they primarily want to target other
> types of users.
> 

Well, any entity having existing users may want to migrate them, but that
should not really affect the default setup. Exactly how a "migrated
desktop" will look like will probably depend on a lot of thing and isn't
IMHO really in scope of this discussion. 

I wouldn't use such tools anyways 8-)

> > > As for what default setup comes from GNOME sources and is thus
> > > "recommended", I think it should only be a single workspace. As people
> > > have already mentioned, people not used to the concept of multiple
> > > workspaces can get horribly confused by them.
> > > In the end I think it would be nice if the default was chosen according
> > > to userlevel ("experienced" users are more likely to have encountered
> > > the concept of multiple workspaces before).
> > 
> > People who find the idea of mutiple desktops confusing have zero, nada,
> > zilch chance of surviving for more than 10 seconds in the GNOME
> > environment with all it's quirky behaviours, gnome specific slang and
> > general confusion anyways.
> 
> And we want to change that, don't we?
> 

Hopefully yes.

> 
> Christian
> 

	Sander

One day a tortoise will learn to fly
	-- Terry Pratchett, 'Small Gods'