Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

    GNOME needs a metric of "success".  Years ago it was "10x10", which is
    ridiculous today as it was when it was first proposed.  But it reveals an
    implicit assumption: "more users == success".  We need a firm statement from
    the foundation on this.  Is it possible that "easier to use and more
    productive than either Windows or MacOS" == success?

I think it would be a mistake to equate success with "more users".
More users tends to be a sign of success, but it isn't success.

Theoretically, success is a matter of contribution to the free
software community.  But that is hard to estimate, so we have to judge
by things we can see.  Namely, how well GNOME enables a free operating
system to meet its GUI-related goals.

I think the main practical goals for a GUI are:

* Self-evidence or naturalness.
* Ease of use (for the system as a whole)
* Consistency (of the system as a whole).
* Ease of looking under the hood
  (for someone who knows more about the system and wants
  to understand how GNOME relates to it).

Consistency of the system as a whole would benefit if GNOME and KDE
had the same default key and mouse bindings, and perhaps a common
graphical way to configure changes in those bindings.  That might
be a goal for GNOME 4.

I also suggest storing the user's configuration data in an ASCII
format, so that you can read it into any text editor and see what it
says.  This change might have no visible effect on the graphical
interfaces of GNOME -- it could be purely "internal".  But when a user
wants to "look under the hood" to investigate a problem, this change
would make that a lot easier to do.