Re: [Usability] Re: Decision: instant apply window buttons

[David Moles <david moles vykor com>]

On Tue, 2002-01-22 at 09:21, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> [dropping a bunch of CC line]
> 
> Richard Stallman <rms gnu org> writes:
> > Ever since GNOME development began, I have urged people to aim
> > to make it as good as the Macintosh.  To try to be like Windows
> > is to try for second-best.
> 
> You are defining "best" in a vacuum that doesn't include "users have
> already learned Windows, and go back and forth between free systems
> and Windows throughout their day."

That's definitely something that needs to be considered, and I 
wonder if anyone's done testing that specifically addresses that 
kind of situation.

It strikes me, though, that there might be two fundamentally
incompatible approaches to solving it "perfectly". In their
extreme forms, the two approaches would be (1) to emulate Windows
exactly (the approach the KDE-based "user-friendly" distributions
seem to be taking) and (2) to diverge enough from Windows that
users can flip a mental mode switch and stop expecting GNOME to
behave like Windows.