Re: "Keep Aligned" mode in nautilus

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

sön 2003-05-04 klockan 18.16 skrev Ben Davis:
> <rant>
> I realize that GNOME has the tendancy to include as little customization 
> options as possible. While this is a good approch, I think there are 
> ways you can have a clean look without sacrificing options.  What we 
> need is to have multi-level preferences, at the least, a standard and 
> advanced set of prefs, where the advanced preferences are initially 
> hidden from the user.

This is from what I can see basically a "user level" approach that you
are suggesting. In fact, Nautilus had user levels at one time in the
past, with more "advanced" preferences and behavior in the higher user
levels. This approach turned out to have its own share of problems
though, and you can find all the gory details in the archives of this
and other lists (the usability one for example). It's a topic that has
been brought up and explained countless times.

Basically many users didn't understand how the choice of user levels
affected the application, or even that it affected the application, or
that the choice could be altered later. Also, many people tend to
classify themselves wrongly (i.e. more or less of an expert than they
really are) and some even are intimitated by having to classify
themselves. So user levels caused possibly even greater problems than
they were intended to solve, and were in the end also removed.


> An even more advanced user should be given the 
> option to tweak config files for all of those off-the-wall preferences. 

GNOME already has that, with the choice of configuring documented gconf
settings for more or less exotic behavior in many cases.


> That said, GNOME is doing a marvelous job, and it has unlimited 
> potential.  If done right, it could really help to entice computer users 
> to start using open software for every-day computing.

:-)


Christian