Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: [Galeon-devel] native scrollbars (again)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Abe Fettig <abe fettig net> writes: 
> Some people (hackers, many/most current Linux users) really want to have
> complete control over their desktop.  They want to be able to customize
> everything. 

FWIW I don't think that's really true. "Can't customize XYZ" is an
extremely rare bug report/feature request in Red Hat bugzilla and
forums. When someone asks to customize something, it's usually just a
polite way of saying they think it's broken. e.g. "can I turn off the
following obnoxious behavior." But then adding a preference is WRONG,
the right thing to do is just change it.

Personally I hate apps with huge prefs dialogs. I can't find the prefs
I actually care about.

The reason I mention RH bugzilla/forums is that we get a lot of Linux
users who maybe aren't involved in the community, e.g. not on mailing
lists and such. "Silent majority" perhaps.

Anyhow, anytime you think you want a preference, you should instead
consider whether the current behavior is simply _wrong_, and should
simply be _fixed_.

> Fortunately, you CAN have it both ways: just make "Show Advanced
> Options" an option, or borrow the Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced setup
> from Nautilus.  Actually, I believe that a while ago there was some talk
> about making the Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced thing work across all
> applications for Gnome 2.0, but I'm not sure what became of it.

There's a place for user levels and "advanced" tabs, but I think a
fairly small one. Prefs in those tabs still have the main
disadvantages of too many prefs. Users will still find them; they
still complicate the app; they still keep developers from really
fixing the defaults. It's really noticeably harder to
maintain/QA/stabilize an app with a million prefs; you rapidly spend a
lot of time dealing with prefs interactions. Of course simple prefs
like colors are less harmful in this respect.

Moreover, if I'm Advanced, I still want to find the 10 prefs I care
about on the Advanced tab; I don't want to sort through 300 useless
prefs. i.e. the same UI concern that makes you limit prefs on the
Beginner tab also applies to the Advanced tab. Advanced users should
still get a good UI, maybe just one with more technical jargon.

The worst kind of prefs are the "make the user sort out how the system
works" ones, the classic one is backspace not working out-of-box for
terminals, some more GUI-related ones are in many WM prefs dialogs
("focus windows that don't ask for focus," "ignore program-specified
positions," that kind of thing). Oh, a really bad one in current GNOME
is the Desk Guide properties dialog. There's just no excuse for this
kind of stuff being in the prefs. 

Make the program work; users don't care how it works. And that's true
for hackers as well. I know I don't care how my desktop works, I just
want it to do the right thing.

Havoc