Hi! (Disclamer: I am not a gnome-shell developer) > As a long-time, advanced user of Linux as the main Desktop OS, I would > love to provide feedback on the Gnome Shell. I think it has tremendous > potential but the version in Fedora 14 is certainly rough around the > edges. I too believe that the project would benefit from user feedback > early on (you know, release early, release often). Sure that what this list is for though it seems that the developers in general keep more attention on bugzilla reports of all kinds. > As a user with good intents, it is quite off-putting to get the canned > response that the version used to file feedback and thoughts on > usability is outdated compared to what the devs are seeing on their > own desktops. It just does not fit how many of us think about > community development. It is unfortunately quite difficult to build > the Shell on the distributions that I have tried so far, and I suspect > this is true for others as well. If anyone is able to roll more > current F14 or Arch Linux packages, for instance, I think sharing > those packages along with an up-to-date manual to deal with all the > quirks to get it built, would bring lots of useful feedback from early > adopters. The jhbuild procedure currently fails on many steps on F14. It works here on F14 (two systems) without any problems. Can you give the exact errors you are getting? It's unlikely that anybody will be able to provide packages for a GNOME 2.32 distribution as you really don't want to update glib and clutter system wide or update gtk+3 on distributions that ship it already. > Even if the feedback from an individual user may have an overall > negative feel to it, please remember that the person took the time to > write and send it to the list because he/she cares about the project. > The desktop interface is not like a normal, stand-alone application > but something which sets the terms for all GUI interaction a user has > with the computer. It is completely expected that there will be > different opinions on how to design the workflow and solve problems. > The KDE guys experienced a major backlash with the UI paradigm changes > with KDE 4.0 and we do not want history to repeat itself with Gnome 3. > If the users do not seem to "get" a particular design choice, please > take a few moments to explain them. Gnome has made great progress on > usability, so I expect there are well thought-out ideas behind most of > what we see. I hope I didn't make the impression that the feedback would be worthless. But the original mail was to me like "You do everything wrong - I know better" which isn't a very constructive way to influence development of ANY project. There is tons of information at live.gnome.org/GnomeShell why certain design decision were taken. One might disagree with those but that would mean to really show off better ideas. The taskbar thing is very controversal (and has been discussed to lengths on the list) however, few people that actually used gnome-shell for a longer time have complained that they miss the task bar. But of course people are used to this kind of taskbar since Windows 95 (remember that Windows 3.1 didn't have that concept?). Nevertheless, even Windows 7 did lots of changes to the taskbar (yeah, called Superbar now) because Microsoft realized that it is hard to use which many windows open. Regards, Johannes
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