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

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel liebesgedichte net>]

On Thu, 2002-08-29 at 19:17, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco wrote:
>  > 2) Developers try to find good compromises and the best way to do
>  > things.
> 
> Undisputably a sound method, provided they also listen to their users.

Well, if something doesn't work well for you, then bring it up. Looking
at Bugzilla, etc I see lots of this situations and the developers do a
remarkable job at listening so far (IMHO). Of course it's annoying if
someone isn't interested in finding a solution that is good for
everybody but just goes on ranting about how much the developers all
suck for changing his favorite feature. :) 


> I'll ask again: provided that a compromise between interface
> consistency/linearity and configuration options _has_ to be reached,
> what's so wrong with an "Advanced Preferences" dialog?

If it _had_ to be reached, then an advanced preferences dialog would
probably be the best solution. But luckily it isn't. 
What I like though is gconf. Sometimes it might make sense to add a
gconf option for something that isn't really any usefull but requested
by freaks for whatever reason. ;) But only if it doesn't interfere with
any other option or behaviour... Then someone can write a Tweak UI-like
application to set all this stuff that isn't supposed to be set.


> I hope that we're not trying to be cured of "featuritis" only to catch
> "dumbeddownitis". Not only inexperienced and advanced users (whatever
> these labels may mean to you) can benefit from the same environment
> IMHO, but I think it would be unfair to trade GNOME 1.4 users' needs
> (*existing*, real users), and other possible "advanced" users as well,

This isn't happening. If something doesn't work for you then ask about
it, I'm sure people here will listen. But don't just ask for more
configurability in general. Getting rid of "configuritis" has nothing to
do with "dumbdownitis". ;) You can be pretty sure that developers aren't
developing from a Windows or MacOS desktop so while interested in
serving the masses, they won't forget to make it usable for themself
(i.e. for hackers).

- Daniel