Re: [Usability]Attempt at constructive criticism - "Why Gnome 2 sucks for me"

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Ali Akcaagac <ali akcaagac stud fh-wilhelmshaven de> writes: 
> during the time i paid a lot of attention on the mailinglists, on other
> news announcing sites (even slashdot) and the gnome channel. a top list
> of stuff that people came up with <these are examples only so please
> don't nail me down on this>:

Whenever you change a piece of software, some people liked it the way
it was before, and they voice their opinion. Sometimes those people
are right and sometimes they aren't, you just have to see.

Lots of functionality from 1.4 was restored to 2.0 by popular demand,
from dingus click to click-active-task-to-minimize. More will be
restored in the future, and some will never be. 2.0 also has a number
of new features and 2.2 will have more. We just have to make a
best-judgment decision on a case-by-case basis.

> - removed customizability
> - where can i set the windowmanager
> - windows registry like system
> - changed button order
> - it looks like macos x

The thing is, most desktop users will like or be indifferent to all of
those things, with the possible exception of button order. People
don't want to customize things that should just work; they don't know
what a window manager or registry is and would be angry if you made
them learn; they like OS X's appearance.

> thank you for reading. please don't bash me for this.
> 

I don't mean to bash you. I just want to set realistic expectations
for what GNOME is about, and what we're trying to achieve. We are
trying to do what few free software projects have done, and design
with real desktop users in mind, and not exclusively for traditional
Linux or UNIX enthusiasts.

A lot of traditional users like GNOME 2 - I see a lot of supportive
mail.  It turns out that many times once the growing pains are ironed
out we end up with something better for traditional users and also
better for desktop users. But if you aren't in the group that likes
this direction, or can't tolerate changes and experiments as we try to
figure out the best solution to a given problem, maybe GNOME isn't
what you want - that's why there's a choice of desktops.

Havoc