GNOME and the way forward [LWN.net]

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 1:00 UTC (Thu) by arcticwolf (guest, #8341)
Parent article: GNOME and the way forward

It is hard to imagine that a desktop as complex and featureful as GNOME would be free of glitches.

Well, you have just given a sample list of some annoying behaviour in GNOME above, so imagining a desktop free of glitches is as easy as taking that list as a list of bugs that should be fixed. :)

The real problem, though, is not that GNOME is doing things a certain way, or the specific way it seems to be choosing (that is, doing things like Windows does instead of the way they're traditionally done on Unix). Rather, the underlying problem lies in the complexity of a system such as a desktop environment - there will always be people who dislike the current behaviour and wish to change it. Fortunately, though, this is a problem that can be dealt with - by making things configurable, it can be made possible for everyone to adapt the environment exactly to their needs, while at the same time making sure that the learning curve for first-timers is not too steep.

It is important to note, however, that the complexity is inherent in the system and cannot be gotten rid of. This is what Windows tries to do, and why it ultimately fails to provide a good desktop environment; GNOME seems to be emulating this, getting caught in the same trap where the product and its interface are dictated by marketing rather than being based on a rational evaluation of what can be done and what makes (or doesn't make) sense.

It has often been said that systems should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler than that - oversimplification ultimately creates more problems than it solves, and that goes for desktop environments just as for everything else.

I'm always somewhat sad that the GNOME developers (still) do not seem to understand this. But fortunately, in an open source world, there are viable alternatives - you aren't forced to use what some company thought would be best for their bottom line.

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GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 2:43 UTC (Thu) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link]

Deciding what the boundary line for "too simple" is the tricky part of what you're saying. Different users will have different boundaries for as simple as possible/too simple.

This trickiness is compounded by figuring out who gets to decide what is "as simple as possible." The developers and maintainers do, of course, but as this article pointed out, if the developers and maintainers do not listen to their user base, the project might fail. So, who do the developers listen to?

That is, who is the targeted user base? If it is the power user, you might end up bewildering the casual user with too many options, bells, and whistles. If it is the casual computer user (i.e. non "power" user), then a simple desktop without too many distracting options is a good thing. Even some power users find this refreshing.

Some users, especially power users, on the other hand, enjoy fiddling with their desktop until it's just right. These users will become frustrated with the very simple desktop targeted at casual users. It appears that some vocal LWN readers (and many KDE users) fall into this latter group.

The next question is how you satisfy both groups. GNOME has tried (and at least partially failed, obviously) to satisfy the power users by placing many configuration options in a place hidden from the casual user but hopefully accessible to the power user: gconf-editor. Whether it is the fact that these options are partially hidden or whether it is the design of gconf-editor, power users do not appear to be satisfied. If it is the latter, one would hope that some power users would pitch in to make gconf-editor more user-friendly to the power users. It should also be noted that there are other, very under-publicized GNOME tools out there for the power user. See GNOME Power User Tools.

Lastly, making everything configurable-- even with hidden configuration options-- comes at a cost to the developers and can make the software unusable. See an article by Havoc Pennington with a section entitled The Question of Preferences. See also the recent blog by Matthias Ettrich, the founder of KDE, regarding having too many preference options, with the header entitled Configurability. So, having "too many" options (whatever that is) is also not the answer.

Getting the desktop just right for both casual users and power users is very, very tricky. OSX seems to do this well, by all reports. Does anyone have any insight as to why?

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 22, 2005 19:19 UTC (Mon) by utoddl (subscriber, #1232) [Link]

Lastly, making everything configurable-- even with hidden configuration options-- comes at a cost to the developers and can make the software unusable.

There was a passage in the Amiga User Interface Styleguide (or something like that -- it's been a while since I pulled it out) that gave what I thought was pretty good advice:

Don't create a user option just because you were unable to make a design decision.

(or something like that). Clearly some things need to be configurable by users, but not everything. And as you point out, some unanticipated configurations may prove unstable.