Re: Disliking gnome 3

[Pasha R <pashar ml gmail com>]

On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 4:55 PM, Giovanni Campagna
<scampa giovanni gmail com> wrote:
> Il giorno gio, 01/09/2011 alle 21.42 +0300, Pasha R ha scritto:
>> On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 9:16 PM, Adam Tauno Williams
>> <awilliam whitemice org> wrote:
>> > On Thu, 2011-09-01 at 18:16 +0300, Pasha R wrote:
>> >> My problem is that shell is simply inconvenient to use and insulting
>> >> attitude of developers
>> >
>> > I don't feel insulted at all.
>> Good for you. I find an attitude commonly expressed on this and some
>> other lists "we know better what you should want" insulting.
>

First of all, thank you for an answer.

>
> I concede that our solutions are not meant for everybody, as there may
> be people with different conflicting requirements, but we're still
> convinced they apply for the vast majority of our target user base. On

This is my first problem: what is your target user base? I don't think
it is "advanced" users, since they usually want to customize their
systems much more than allowed by current design. It is also probably
not "novice" users - for example I don't see my mother typing
application name anytime soon, and she will definitely feel lost in
all these icons thrown into overview.

> the other hand, trying to cater for too many use patterns and workflow
> would increase the complexity of the overall system, not just in terms
> of code (which is not irrelevant) but also in terms of usability.
> Options have a huge cost, because users will either flee, scared by the
> the risk of breaking everything, or they will start asking and craving
> the documentation, just to find out it was something completely useless
> to them, because it broke the basic design pattern. Or even worse, the
> option could be exposing what is really an implementation detail (such
> as the panel applet configuration in 2.*).

Options probably have a huge cost, but lack of them has huge cost,
too. As I said already, there are people with different tastes and
personal preferences, things that look beautiful logical and
convenient to you, may look ugly, illogical and inconvenient to
others.


>
> Nevertheless, as we still want to enlarge our user base and grow our
> market share (with the ultimate goal of supplanting proprietary software
> around the world), we are providing you with a powerful instrument that
> basically allows you to build your own shell: extensions. It's true, the
> system was not complete in 3.0, and it required manual interaction as
> well as not having a complete repository. On the other hand, in 3.2
> installing extensions will be as simple as going to
> extensions.gnome.org, finding what you need and pressing a button.
> We already have extensions that restore much of the GNOME 2
> functionality (a dock, an application menu, a workspace switcher, a
> window based alt-tab, just to name a few), and we expect the number to
> increase release after release. And of course, since you quote Linus, if
> you don't find something that suits, you know what to do.

Yet again, I don't think extensions is the right answer. Extensions
are good for providing new functionality, not for providing what
really should be a checkbox away. My (oversimplified) view of what I
would like to see, is something like gnome-tweak-tool, which would
come with all extensions you mentioned and would allow to switch
on/off individual options.


>
> Hoping this clarified our vision and hoping that there won't be any
> further misunderstanding,
>
> Giovanni Campagna
>