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such nastiness.such nastiness.Posted Jul 29, 2012 11:54 UTC (Sun) by slashdot (guest, #22014)In reply to: such nastiness. by tuna Parent article: Otte: staring into the abyss
That's probably because people either decided to buy Mac hardware, got OS X and were too lazy/cheap/ignorant/uncaring to switch to Windows or Linux, or they switched to OSX with the strong initial belief that it would be an awesome OS, probably due to experience with Apple mobile devices or contact with Apple marketing and branding, or they simply want to be different from the mainstream at all costs, and either want a highly branded commercial product, or don't care enough about computers to replace Windows with a good OS like the leading Linux distributions.
With no easy way of widely preloading into hardware, no massive marketing budget, no tying with other products, a reputation for being uncool and user unfriendly, and desktop being mostly a "solved problem" which no real way to make dramatic improvements, no Linux desktop environment has any chance of gaining users that way.
The only sensible choice is to rely on the "free, open, and not screwing the customer" angle and make really sure to not disappoint the user at first, and THEN show him innovations or improvements, if any are present.
Of course GNOME is doing it totally wrong, since not only they immediately disappoint most users with absurd behavior, but the "open and not screwing with the user" advantage also goes completely out of the window, because while Microsoft and Apple reliably try to screw users for monetary gain where possible, but otherwise attempt to make users happy, the GNOME developers seem to seek to screw users for sadistic pleasure at all times, which is actually worse.
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such nastiness. Posted Jul 29, 2012 13:36 UTC (Sun) by Company (guest, #57006) [Link]
So, lemme get this right.
You provide every feature that any user would want and you keep it that way forever. Unless of course, you're adding something that's new and innovative. Or you're targeting lazy/cheap/ignorant/uncaring users.
Did I get that right?
such nastiness. Posted Jul 29, 2012 14:26 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] In another part of this thread you considered the issue of why people have a "hate on something" and concluded that... We must have seriously messed things up in the marketing phase of GNOME 3, I'm pretty sure of that. The point being made about keeping features is most likely to be a reflection on the maturity of GNOME 2 and KDE 3 along with both projects' abandonment of that maturity in favour of less mature, experimental, arguably ill-informed approaches to user interface design. In other words, we all had a good thing going and only needed to improve on it, but instead of doing that, whole projects re-oriented themselves towards imitating supposedly intimidating competitors like Windows Vista that turned out to be commercial failures, leaving those Free Software projects significantly disadvantaged. I think you need to resist the temptation to classify criticism as "hate" and to restate criticism in terms of unreasonable demands that might not have been made in the first place.
such nastiness. Posted Jul 29, 2012 14:59 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] You provide every feature that any user would want and you keep it that way forever No, not at all. You don't attempt to provide every feature that any user would want. However, removing existing features is very bad and should only be done after extremely serious consideration and only if it results in a very substantial code cleanup or other benefit.
such nastiness. Posted Jul 29, 2012 22:54 UTC (Sun) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
cf what someone else said about Linus and linux ...
And yes I know linux has very recently deleted a large chunk of functionality BUT ... the rationale was very sensible. "Most of this stuff seems to have been broken for quite a while. If nobody can be bothered to fix it, why are we keeping it?".
As someone (same someone?) said "don't delete stuff that users care about" - obviously nobody cares about the stuff that's gone.
Cheers,
such nastiness. Posted Jul 30, 2012 8:26 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Also "the hardware's never been available for systems built in the last decade and a half, since it is MCA-only, and we are not running a computer museum". Nobody is really going to want to Linux 3.5 on an IBM PS/2.
such nastiness. Posted Jul 30, 2012 13:19 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Removing support for obsolete hardware is fine; that's a valid reason to remove features. Removing support for something in a desktop environment "just because" is not a good reason.
such nastiness. Posted Jul 31, 2012 22:41 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Speaking as a user of both Trinity and Emacs ('no features removed since 1976, except for old-style backquote'), I completely agree!
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