Re: Communicating to users what GNOME 3.0 is

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 7:48 AM, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:

All change forces users to do something (or to stick with what they
already have - no rule says you have to upgrade to the latest greatest
version of GNOME). Fighting against this is a losing battle. Better in
my opinion to be very straightforward about what's going & what's coming
and rather than trying to placate people, stick to "the party line" -
the new stuff is better than the old, nicer user interface, better
design, better for all users (including you) - I understand you don't
particularly want change, and you're free to keep using the old stuff,
but we think the new stuff's better".

A somewhat "me too post"... 

The only thing I would worry about with respect to changes iat least in user interface is the training factor.  Big shops would have put a lot of money/time in training people to use GNOME 2.x.  If you move to shell then it costs them time and money again to change.  If it is too large then they'll start shopping around for either KDE (which is okay in the context that we want people to stay on free software) or worse they'll move to another platform.  As you say they don't have to move, but we want them to move so we can stop supporting some of the older technologies.

We should be able to have some kind of method to switch back  and forth between the old and new interfaces so that these people can make the transition at their own pace.  A series of articles showing cool tricks and what not would be helpful to encourage them to use the new interface.  But lets not force it on them or make them use older versions.  People accept change at variable rates and we should allow for that.  My two cents.

sri