Re: Location of Desktop Preferences menu (was Reducing the number of special uris in gnome)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Daniel McKee <daniel netcom mine nu> writes: 
> But something to keep in mind, is, do we want Gnome/Linux/X to become
> like a Mac? Too worried about "ignorant" people using the PC that most
> of the features that the average user will want, get's buried or taken
> out, because it might confuse grandma or someone like that.  The average
> user running Linux right now, isn't that ignorant Windows/Mac user or
> Grandma next door.

Well I don't really see your point. In what way does calling the menu
"Preferences" or "Actions" instead of "GNOME" hurt the traditional
Linux user. I don't see how it does. There is no tradeoff here.  Even
if there were, the menus are editable and hackable if someone really
cares.

But aside from that, your idea of the average user is completely
off-base. The average user _definitely_ does not know what GNOME
is. I'd go so far as to say that 95% of users don't know and would
never understand even if we had huge marketshare and tried hard to
educate them. 

It's not because they are "ignorant," it's because they don't give a
damn and would not bother to listen - something us technical types
find hard to comprehend, but there it is. ;-)

Smart people such as the animators that make Star Wars, or hard
science grad students, have usability problems on the level of "how do
I add a launcher to the panel" and "can't find things in the menus"
and "not finding the non-default pages in a notebook control." These
are not dumb people. They just don't care about computers.

So anyway, when you make this kind of rhetorical argument, you're
defending making a desktop for sysadmins and programmers and no one
else. A 2%-marketshare desktop. Don't overestimate the size of the
technical population.

GNOME is more ambitious than that.

Havoc