[Usability] Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

[Nat Friedman <nat novell com>]

On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 17:46 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.

Everyone on this list knows the Linux desktop is in a "pick your poison"
state right now.  

Anyone who's used Linux for a year has experienced this, whatever
choices they've made of desktop environment, settings, etc.

We can snipe at each other all day long.  (Linus, every time I copy
large files between devices on my Linux system my mouse pointer skips.
It works fine on my Mac).  That's not productive.

Usability is important.  Usability encompasses multiple things:
functionality, robustness, performance, sensible user interface design.
We all need to do a better job of this (insert usability
testing/betterdesktop.org plug here).

Yes, some GNOME developers are self-appointed control freak antifeature
nazis who've stripped functionality in pursuit of some theoretical "non
geek" user who does not exist, thereby crippling their software.

And probably some KDE developers are feature sluts who never saw a
checkbox they didn't love, exposing users to all kinds of broken
features.

Follow either of these ideas to their logical extremes and we won't have
a useful desktop for a large user base.

We need Linux to grow up if we're going to make Linux on the desktop a
success.  Let's have a grown-up discussion.  If I worked for Microsoft
I'd be very happy to see you throwing pejoratives around like that on
this list.

So, yes, usability is important and Linus being able to bind his mouse
buttons to whatever he wants is important, I guess.  But it's probably
not what's stopping Linux from dominating the desktop market.  What's
holding Linux back on the desktop?  Applications, device support.  Time,
also.  The printing dialog?  I don't know.

(By the way, on my GNOME machine at home, there is code running that
parses the options from the PPD file and makes a GUI out of them.  Maybe
this ships in SUSE but not in whatever distro Till is using?)

Nat