Re: collecting negative reviews

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 9/12/05, Santiago Roza <santiagoroza gmail com> wrote:
> It's done: I've read [almost] every single comment from the 2.12
> release articles (including Slashdot and OSNews, which Travis was
> going to cover... sorry Travis, I got carried away), and here's the
> compiled list of complaints/suggestions/etc.

Has this information been thrown into the wiki? It'll be good to have
a workplace somewhere were we can collect it all, add new information
as we collect it, and publicly list what we've done to address each
issue.
 
> 
> * GENERAL CRITICISMS/SUGGESTIONS: TOP 5
> (common to most articles)
> 
> 1) add full GNOME VFS support to all applications (especially GNOME apps)
> 2) optimize performance and memory footprint
> 3) Nautilus seems to be the most criticised GNOME app: many people say
> it's slow (compared to Konqueror or Win Explorer), many complain about
> not being able to type URLs in the File Selector/Manager (without
> pressing Ctrl+L), many complain about not being able to (easily) turn
> off the multi-window behaviour, and some others think it lacks
> functionality (found in Konqueror or Win Explorer)
> 4) most people disliked the new menu editor; they suggest we bundle
> SMEG (or something equally capable)
> 5) many many readers asked where to find updated packages for their
> distribution; maybe we should work alongside with major distros to
> have GNOME packages ready on release time (or make our own packages)

It might be good for someone who has a deep understanding of where we
are to break these issues (and any others that Santiago, Travis, or
others identified) into two categories in the wiki:

* things we need to figure out how to actually fix (which actually
looks like most of these)
* things that are failures in education/information dissemination- for
example, I worked hard right before the release to improve the web
sites' information about how to get the product (which is a key part
of the problem behind #5.) I imagine that if you extended the list to
a 'top ten', many of 6-10 would fall into this category of necessary
action.

Anyway, I think this might be a long term project which I hope someone
will take on and regularly renew as we find more criticisms and
misinformations/FUDs which we can gather and attempt to remedy. But
this is a great start- thanks, Santiago.

Luis

> * OTHER GENERAL CRITICISMS/SUGGESTIONS:
> (not so common and/or relevant)
> 
> - stability issues with xcompmgr (X Compositing Manager; it handles
> transparency/shadows)
> - doubts about the nature of the GNOME LiveCD ("what is it based on?"
> - IMHO next time we should clearly state it's based on Ubuntu)
> - complaints about certain lack of ACL functionality (some users
> suggest that we should at least integrate Eiciel into Nautilus)
> 
> 
> 
> * CRITICISMS/SUGGESTIONS FROM SPECIFIC ARTICLES:
> (and/or their comments)
> 
> http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=11800
> - incomplete/confusing API documentation
> - add full front-end to the Bluetooth stack
> - "phone and PDA syncing that actually works"
> 
> http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=11788&limit=no&threshold=-1
> http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=11800&limit=no&threshold=-1
> - easily open a terminal in the current directory (like the
> nautilus-open-terminal add-on)
> - "merge all settings into one single preferences application"
> 
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/07/2329227&from=rss
> - stability of multimedia software (especially Totem and the GStreamer
> framework in general)
> - some readers say their GNOME 2.12 "feels" faster due to 3D
> acceleration; in the future we should think of some way to tell them
> if it's turned on or not (to avoid these false impressions)
> 
> http://gnomedesktop.org/node/2391
> - "spatial metaphor in GNOME broken and violated (eg: the file open
> dialog is always navigational, never spatial)"
> 
> 
> 
> * ARTICLES WITH NO COMMENTS:
> (or no interesting comments... or which comments I couldn't find
> because I'm an idiot :P)
> 
> http://barrapunto.com/article.pl?sid=05/09/07/191200
> http://lwn.net/Articles/150676/
> http://channels.lockergnome.com/linux/archives/20050907_gnome_212_released.phtml
> http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id=30291&category=software
> http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS4356551088.html
> http://digg.com/linux_unix/GNOME_2.12_Released
> http://www.linuxparatodos.net/geeklog/article.php?story=20050908001403158
> http://www.softwarelivre.org/news/4696
> http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=dl&s=50009562&f=174096756&x_id=1126212290&x_subject=GNOME+2.12+is+afoot&x_link=http://arstechnica.com&x_ddp=Y
> http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/flameeyes/2005/08/25/gnome_2_12
> http://news.softpedia.com/news/GNOME-Launches-GNOME-2-12-Desktop-7909.shtml
> http://cofradia.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=15041
> http://www.techspot.com/news/18650-gnome-212-released.html
> http://hardware.newsforge.com/newsvac/05/09/07/207230.shtml
> http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=danews.story&STORY=/www/story/09-07-2005/0004102090&EDATE=WED+Sep+07+2005,+01:13+PM
> http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050907/sfw131.html
> http://www.linuxelectrons.com/article.php/20050907120839978
> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/GNOME_Project_unveils_latest_version_of_Linux_and_Unix_desktop
> http://br-linux.org/linux/?q=node/1715
> http://www.softwarelivre.org/news/4696
> http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39217105,00.htm
> http://www.techtree.com/techtree/jsp/article.jsp?article_id=67998&cat_id=580
> http://www.newsforge.com/newsvac/05/09/07/1546239.shtml
> http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1856185,00.asp
> 
> 
> 
> * ARTICLES IN GERMAN/FRENCH:
> (two languages I can't read, so unless we want to trust Google Translate...):
> 
> http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/63253
> http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=2160606
> http://linuxfr.org/2005/09/08/19543.html
> http://www.pro-linux.de/news/2005/8610.html
> http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/63689
> http://www.oszine.de/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3941
> http://www.linux-community.de/Neues/story?storyid=17628
> 
> 
> --
> Santiago Roza
> santiagoroza gmail com
> http://santiagoroza.blogspot.com/
>