GNOME and the way forward [LWN.net]

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 2:27 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
Parent article: GNOME and the way forward

The problem is that the GNOME developers seem to think that their way is the Right Way (tm) and are unwilling to accept that maybe they should give people choices.

Let's face it, a Windows user switching to GNOME will suffer all kinds of jarring discontinuities. So I think it's pointless to try to make GNOME appeal to some mythical user base if that means alienating its existing user base, which is pretty much UNIX/Linux geeks.

My pet peeve is Evolution's lack of support for an external editor. I've been told that "nobody sane" cares about that.

Why, then, does every UNIX mailer I can think of (Pine, Mutt, kmail,
Sylpheed, Balsa, Mahogany, Thunderbird) support an external editor? Are all of those developers stupid enough to spend time implementing a feature that "nobody sane" cares about?

No, the problem is that an external editor is something that no GNOME developer cares about, and therefore by extension, only whingers and bearded UNIX hackers care about it, and they don't matter.

That is why GNOME is becoming irrelevant to me, and why I hope it fades from the scene if the developers don't change their attitude.

And I do not agree when you state "There are limits to how much one should complain about that." Because of the state of the Linux market, the GNOME developers have considerable influence in the future of Free desktop software. I certainly didn't embrace Linux to be trapped in another limiting Windows clone. Unfortunately, that's the way GNOME is heading.

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GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 2:53 UTC (Thu) by coulamac (subscriber, #21690) [Link]

Your disagreement with the Evolution maintainer should not be a basis for tarring the entire GNOME developer community. If Evolution is not your cup of tea because of the external editor issue, free free to use other mail programs. Maybe Balsa will satsify your needs (http://balsa.gnome.org/). Maybe, you should use a non-GNOME mail program. That would be fine: there's no law saying every program you may want to use should be GTK+/GNOME based if you're using GNOME. Similarly, there are KDE users that use GTK+/GNOME programs frequently.

Good luck! :-)

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 3:15 UTC (Thu) by whiprush (subscriber, #23428) [Link]

Dude, really, if an external editor for your MUA is a hugely important feature, then you are not GNOME's target audience.

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 6:24 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

How does an optional capability to interface an external editor to Evolution harm users who are not interested in such a feature?

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 9:27 UTC (Thu) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

It is an extra configuration option, which is what the whole 2.x tree was about minimizing. (Just guessing from the previous thread here.)

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 10:10 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Thank you for asserting that approach to user satisfaction.

I tried GNOME several times and found it annoying at best. You explain perfectly well the root cause of that observation.

Cheers, Joachim

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 13:11 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

If you care about how your text editor works and use any but its very simplest features, you probably want consistency in editor behaviour. (You know: consistency? Supposed to be a *good* idea in UI design?)

If I send a mail in Evolution but do all my other editing in vim or Emacs, I'm currently being unnecessarily forced to use an inconsistent (and, IMHO, grotesquely feature-poor) editor for *only some* things.

*That* is why every other program on the face of the Unix earth supports $EDITOR and $VISUAL. (I fail to see why reading the values of two environment variables would confuse newbies, either. They're invisible if you don't know they're there.)

(Well, except for Emacs apps, and they're somewhat special, running as they do *inside* an editor.)

What you're saying is that if you care about your user interface or care about the job you spend most of your time doing when interacting with a mail program (i.e., writing mail), then you're not in the target audience for GNOME. Fine, but this, it seems to me, removes every reason to ever use GNOME email programs in the first place. (Why would you use an easy-to-use user interface's email program if you don't care about ease of use or writing email?)

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 19:15 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Damn. Apparently I'm not in Gnome's target audience even though I've been using it since 1999. Pray tell, Whiprush, what is Gnome's target audience?

I absolutely loathe Evolution's editor. It almost always reformats the mail so what you think you're sending is not at all what actually gets sent. You can't use it for more than a day without running into multiple quotation or copy/paste bugs. But, despite Whiprush's suggestion, I'm not ready to dump the Gnome desktop quite yet.

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 23:51 UTC (Thu) by njhurst (guest, #6022) [Link]

Indeed, after working my way through all the gui mail clients out there I returned to Pine, which has by far the best user interface. For a start you can get going knowing nothing about mail systems. It can use an external editor, and it takes minimal system resources.

(I'd use mutt more, but the interface on mutt is far less 'friendly')

I wonder when gui mail apps will approach the simplicity and ease of use of pine.