Re: GNOME Usability Improvements - Fix the window manager!

[Warren Young <tangent cyberport com>]

sungod wrote:
> At some point, you have to declare old broken (by
> today's standards) technologies dead, and move on. This one thing we
> _must_ copy from Apple: they know when it's time to move on to something
> newer.

Evidence: I have an Apple Macintosh 512K model with an external floppy
drive.  (It was almost a must, given that it didn't have a hard drive.) 
It has an eject button, even though the internal floppy drive didn't.

I've never seen another, so I'm guessing it was a short-lived idea....

I was thinking about this sort of thing today, and I realized something
while contemplating Windows GPFs, or whatever they're calling them these
days.  On a Linux/Unix box, a program just silently goes away when it
crashes, unless you happen to be running it from the shell.  On a
Windows box, the system emits a system-modal dialog box that you must
deal with before you can do anything else with the UI.

The dialog box usually isn't terribly helpful to either the hapless user
or to the programmer trying to figure out WTF happened to his errant
program _this_ time.  (Can you tell I'm a programmer?)  It serves simply
to inform the user that it's time to sigh, or grimmace, or curse, and
then restart the program.

Linux/Unix's crashing behavior isn't immediately helpful, either.  In
fact, sometimes it's less helpful, because the program simply goes away,
not even giving a cryptic attempt at telling you why.  Yet, it's enough
to let you know that it's time to sigh, or grimmace, or curse, and then
restart the program.

Yet, you're still ahead with Linux/Unix: you now have a permanent,
detailed record of what happened (the core file) that you can ship to
the developer for his edification.  (You don't know how helpful this is
until you try to debug a program running in Michigan from your office in
New Mexico.)

Does that not wrap up the philosophies of the two systems perfectly?

In case you're wondering, yes, this does have relevance to GNOME, and
specifically to this debate: engineering is tradeoffs, and it happens
that Unix was engineered really well for what it tried to be: an
efficient, portable, and relatively simple multi-user operating system. 
It's all well and fine to suggest enhancements that make the system more
suitable for one class of users or another, but let's not try to break
fundamental design decisions in the process.  The community won't accept
them.  IMHO, we refuse with good reason.
-- 
= Warren 
= ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m