The GNOME project at 15
In the mid 1990's, the Linux desktop experience was provided by such aesthetically striking components as the fvwm window manager, the Xaw toolkit, and the Midnight Commander file manager. That was more than enough for many early Linux users, quite a few of whom, having written their own custom modelines to get X working with their monitors, felt no need for a desktop system beyond what it took to get their xterm windows arranged nicely. Every community has its discontents, though. In this case, one of the first groups to get itself properly organized was the KDE project, which started hacking on an integrated desktop environment in 1996 and which, by the middle of 1997, had some interesting results to show.
The problem with KDE, of course, is that it relied on the Qt toolkit, and Qt was not, at that time, free software. This decision led to epic flame wars that put current squabbles (GNOME 3, or systemd, say) to shame; they just don't make flames like they used to. Some attempts were made to get Trolltech to change Qt to a free license, but Trolltech was not yet interested in considering such a move. It is interesting to speculate on what might have happened had Qt been relicensed in 1997 rather than three years later; one of the deepest divisions within the free software community might just have been avoided.
Then again, maybe not. We're not entirely happy without something to fight about, and Emacs-versus-vi, by virtue of predating Linux entirely, was old and boring even in 1997.
The stated goals of the newly-launched GNOME project were straightforward
enough: "We want to develop a free and complete set of user friendly
applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based entirely
on free software
". The project would be based on the GTK toolkit
which, to that point, had only really been used with GIMP. The project
also planned to make heavy use of the Scheme language — an objective that
faded into the background fairly quickly.
GNOME itself remained very much in the foreground. Compared to KDE it had a different license (even after Qt was freed), a different implementation language (C vs. C++), and a different approach to the desktop — all fodder for plenty of heated discussions. Miguel was from early on an admirer of Microsoft's ways of doing software development and tried to push many of them into GNOME. Companies were formed around GNOME, including Helix Code/Ximian (eventually acquired by SUSE) and Eazel (which followed the classic dotcom trajectory of burning vast amounts of money before its abrupt death). There was clearly a lot of activity around GNOME from the very beginning.
The project produced three major releases: 1.0 in 1999, 2.0 in 2002, and
3.0 in 2011. The 2.0 release provoked a flood of criticism as the result
of the project's focus on removing options whenever possible. A perceived
arrogance on the developers' part (one described
some user-requested
window manager options as "crack-ridden bogosity
") was not
helpful. The GoneME
fork was started in response, but did not get very far. Over time,
enough features returned to the desktop, and things improved enough
overall, that most users made their peace with it and stopped complaining.
The 3.0 release, instead, has provoked a flood of criticism as the result of the removal of options and features. A perceived arrogance on the developers' part has not helped the situation much. The MATE desktop fork has been started in response; it's too early to say just how far it will get. Meanwhile, a few features have found their way back into subsequent 3.x releases, and some users, at least, have made their peace with it and stopped complaining. Others, needless to say, have not.
Where to from here?
Fifteen years in, it would be hard to argue that GNOME has not been a success. The project is arguably the most successful Linux desktop available. It has an advanced code base, lots of developers, a well established foundation with a fair amount of corporate support, and more. There must be no end of free software projects that can only dream of the level of success that GNOME has achieved.
That said, there is a visible level of concern within the project. The relentless criticism of GNOME 3 has proved discouraging to many developers, and the millions of new users that GNOME 3 was supposed to attract have not yet shown themselves. Distributors are making noises about trying other desktops, and Ubuntu, arguably the highest-profile GNOME-based distribution, has gone off in its own direction with yet another fork. Meanwhile, the desktop in general looks like a shrinking target; the cool kids have gone elsewhere and GNOME seems to not be a part of it. In this situation, what's a project to do?
Allan Day's GNOME OS post shines some light on what at least some of the project's developers are thinking. Much of it looks like a continuation of GNOME's recent work — completing the GNOME 3 user experience for example. Some seems like basic sense: making the system easier to build and test would be near the top of list. Others are unsurprising, but may not get the results the project is after.
The post never uses these words, but the GNOME project clearly wants to put together yet another "app store" infrastructure wherein third parties can offer proprietary applications to users. For whatever reason, enabling proprietary applications has always been seen as the path to success; the whole point of the venerable Linux Standard Base exercise was to attract that kind of application. Making it easier to add applications to the system can only be a good thing, but it will not, on its own, cause either users or developers to flock to the platform.
GNOME also clearly plans to target tablets and handsets. Again, the objective makes sense: that is where a lot of the buzz — and the money — is to be found. The problem here is that this space is already crowded with free (or mostly-free) alternatives. Android dominates this area, of course; platforms like Tizen, Plasma Active, webOS, Firefox OS, and ChromeOS are also looking for users. It is far from clear that GNOME has something to offer that will make it stand out in this crowd, especially since Allan does not expect a "touch-compatible" version of GNOME 3 for another 18 months. As Eitan Isaacson put it recently:
He has an interesting counter-suggestion: GNOME, he says, should aim to be the platform of choice for content creators. There could be some potential here; this is not an area that large numbers of projects are targeting, and incumbents like Mac OS seem vulnerable. Where content creators lead, others will often follow. There are some obvious obstacles (codecs, for example), but this is a target that could possibly be reached.
Most likely, though, GNOME will continue its drive for mainstream success
and those millions of new users. The project might just get there: it
retains a solid code base, many talented developers, and a supporting
ecosystem. One should never underestimate what a determined group of
developers can accomplish when they set their minds to it. The rest of us
should either support them or get out of the way and let them follow their
path. Watch this space over the next fifteen years, and we'll all see what
they are able to achieve.
Posted Aug 14, 2012 21:47 UTC (Tue)
by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701)
[Link] (22 responses)
s/proprietary//
Posted Aug 14, 2012 22:07 UTC (Tue)
by walters (subscriber, #7396)
[Link] (2 responses)
What we can enable though is third parties to distribute applications, whether Free Software or not. Not of course that this hasn't been attempted before...the internet is littered with various ones like Autopackage and such. It's not an easy domain.
However, I think these previous attempts were addressing an actual need, and could be made higher quality if they were integrated into the core of the system rather than an add-on.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 5:55 UTC (Wed)
by bignose (subscriber, #40)
[Link]
No disagreement with that. There's nothing in there which means you can't sell free software apps.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 12:48 UTC (Wed)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link]
These are the same issues that you run into with current package distribution model.
> However, I think these previous attempts were addressing an actual need, and could be made higher quality if they were integrated into the core of the system rather than an add-on.
Unfortunately the 'merging into the system' means that you are likely to run into the same issues with current package management systems.. Namely distributions suffer from seeming irreconcilable differences and tend to create what ends up functioning like fiefdoms for little significant technical advantage over another distro's approach.
In addition to this the regulation and acceptance policies that distributions have set up for their package repositories are a major barrier of entry and bottle neck for that serves as a significant barrier between users and developers.
What is needed is a system that handles applications in a way that is distributed and offers a lot more freedom to users and developers then current practices for package management allows in Linux distributions. Also we need to have something that addresses applications and their dependencies as complete 'application units' rather then individual components. At least from a application developer and user perspective.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 10:44 UTC (Wed)
by njwhite (guest, #51848)
[Link] (18 responses)
Posted Aug 15, 2012 12:59 UTC (Wed)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (3 responses)
If OSS applications are going to remain a sustainable model for application develop on Linux or any other platform it is ONLY going to happen because OSS is a superior approach.
Making it a much larger PITA to distribute software on Linux just because you are afraid of people using proprietary software just means that Linux will remain a PITA... for everything.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 13:49 UTC (Wed)
by njwhite (guest, #51848)
[Link]
Probably, fine (though proprietary software does have some different needs.) I'm not against tools which make it easier to write and distribute proprietary software. I just think that 1) GNOME is an odd place to be distributing it, and 2) I have traditionally admired their strong software freedom positions, which would be rather less credible if they sell it as "GNOME 4: Now with Photoshop."
Posted Aug 15, 2012 14:17 UTC (Wed)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 15, 2012 17:47 UTC (Wed)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link]
GPL has been the cause of innumerable compatibility headaches and rewrites and lawyering. All sorts of otherwise useless and counter productive work as well as causing all sorts of headaches for people that want to use it in all sorts of difference scenarios.
What the GPL does though is a allow people to produce and distribute software without some competitor turning around and using copyright law to screw them over.
This is using a lesser evil (GPL) versus greater evil (abuses of the market through copyright law). It is only necessary because of the legal framework the software must exist in. Without the specter of abuse through the use of copyright laws to stifle competition then GPL would be a terrible thing.
Right now it's a very mixed bag. Hopefully the protections it offers against the law offsets the negatives it introduces. I have the view that generally it does.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 13:14 UTC (Wed)
by andreasb (guest, #80258)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Aug 15, 2012 17:51 UTC (Wed)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (5 responses)
I like the idea that Steam is bringing gaming to Linux and thus Valve has a financial reason to contribute to the improvement of drivers for Linux (which they have done), but I don't like the idea of Steam itself and don't want to use it.
We need a alternative that isn't DRM encumbered.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 18:03 UTC (Wed)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (4 responses)
Also the usage of DRM in Steam is pretty benign as far as DRM goes, games are tied to your account and you can install them as many times on as many machines as you want as long as you log in. You can log in even when offline and you can make offline backups of your purchases. Unless your goal is to redistribute software and artwork that you don't have a valid redistribution license for it doesn't really get in your way. I'm not sure what the valid legal use cases would be that their use of DRM would prevent.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 21:15 UTC (Wed)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link] (3 responses)
This doesn't *seem* to be by design, but given that these bugs have gone unaddressed for upwards of 5 years, it does seem that ensuring your legal rights are fully exerciseable is not at the top of Valve's list.
Meanwhile Valve has some other unpalatable practices, including:
I mean, overall Valve has tried to do right for their customers, but in some areas they're just seemingly entirely unmotivated.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 11:31 UTC (Thu)
by njwhite (guest, #51848)
[Link] (2 responses)
And the issue with DRM is not that the company may be bad, but that they reserve the right to control your use of something. Amazon may have 'promised' that they won't pull books for copyright reasons from the Kindle, but the really awful thing is that they reserve the technological right, to be (ab)used by governments, crackers, disgruntled employees, or who knows who else after a change of policy / ownership.
I can't imagine allowing that for free, let alone paying for the 'privilege.' Imagine Ikea made me sign a waiver that they had the right to come into my house and remove books from the bookshelf I bought, if they deem it necessary. Or more accurately, they install a camera on the bookcase, and a secret magical door through which their "customer service engineers" may step to remove or change books as necessary.
These same arguments work for proprietary software too, actually, which is I suppose why it makes sense for the FSF to be focusing on the issue.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 12:46 UTC (Thu)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (1 responses)
The problem with DRM is the legal baggage. Specifically DMCA. What we don't want is ending up with a situation were it becomes illegal to modify the functionality of something on Linux because it breaks somebody's craptastic DRM implementation.
Which is what already has happened with DVDs and Bluerays as well as having a dramatic negative effect on efforts to write open source drivers. Posted Aug 15, 2012 13:28 UTC (Wed)
by ebassi (subscriber, #54855)
[Link] (6 responses)
writing and deploying applications on Linux is a pain in the ass, for everyone. look at all the hoops Firefox has to jump through, or the indie studios that started distributing their games through the Humble Indie Bundle. no, targeting all distributions is not a viable solution — and neither is "let each distro package your app": it does not scale, and makes the Linux platform look amateurish. any way we can get reduce the pain of application developers (both closed and open source) is a net win in expanding the user base, increasing the adoption of Linux as a viable platform; and with that we get leverage with hardware and software vendors.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 22:58 UTC (Thu)
by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
[Link] (5 responses)
Eh? New Firefox appears and in hours to days the update icon lights up.
Anyone else wants to distribute software they can put up a repo.
If you are expecting all 'Linux distributions' to merge into one unitary OS just to support closed apps, dream on. Go count the attempts to remake a Linux distribution into 'the one' that would be friendly to commercial apps. They are all dead and mostly forgotten.
The worst part of commercial apps isn't their closed nature, it is their stupid nature. The stupidity of their installers. The stupidity of their update mechanisms. The stupidity of their non-integration.
Adobe at least got that right with flash player, just install the repo and 'it just works.' They are about the only commercial vendor to figure that out though. Don't know if I want to call Chrome 'commercial' but Google with their chrome repo does the same thing. And guess what? It just works.
Posted Aug 22, 2012 7:05 UTC (Wed)
by rahvin (guest, #16953)
[Link] (4 responses)
One of the simplest aspects (the format of the package) isn't even a simple question on Linux. If you want broad public use the distributions need to give up their fiefdoms and standardize on some things the least of which is package managers and library versions (personally I'd prefer RPM go away and DEB be standard but that's my bias). We aren't going to see widespread adoption of Linux until this stuff is sorted out. And that means everyone standardizes and follows each other on things like directories (where things are), packages, libraries, kernel version and certain software (X/Wayland, Audio, init, window manager, etc).
Don't get me wrong, I like the choice (its why I use Linux in the first place), but you aren't going to see someone like Adobe building their software for Linux if they have to target 10 distro's with all different libraries, packages and base software where they can't even predict which glibc will be installed.
I know there is work underway to fix some of these problems (I think wayland will be a game changer, along with systemd and others that have the promise of standardization of key components). But in the meantime you have what Firefox did which is to bundle every library version and piece of underlying software into their package so they ensure they have specific versions they need and that's just not practicable for most software, particularly commercial software. Android is popular because Google did what the community couldn't they created a standard base with a guaranteed foundation to build software on. You are absolutely guaranteed that Android version X on every device has the same libraries and base system and their application store uses version and hardware tables to check comparability and tries very hard to avoid offering software you can't run.
I don't see broad Linux success until the distro's play politics and start compromising and standardizing. Everyone going their own way and doing their own thing only fragments things worse and scares away commercial software. Maybe Google will bring enough of Android into Linux that they basically force standardization but I'm skeptical that the major players would be willing to compromise as they would be giving up some sovereignty in their digital fiefdoms.
Getting back on topic, can Gnome do this? I don't think they can, they're scaring away their own users and shooting for things that don't even appear to be in the scope of the project. But I'll give them props if they succeed, but I'll remain skeptical of their chances.
Posted Aug 22, 2012 9:00 UTC (Wed)
by njwhite (guest, #51848)
[Link]
Targetting one popular distro's library versions and creating a package for that, with an easily buildable and repackagable source, gets you as far as you need. Nowadays distributions are far more standard and regular in things than you may think.
I get the impression from your post that you're really concerned about the difficulty in getting proprietary software packaged for many distributions. Ultimately that's a problem caused by their own restrictive licensing terms, and I don't think trying to enforce exactly the same versions of key software on all distributions is a sane way to fix it.
Posted Aug 23, 2012 8:10 UTC (Thu)
by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152)
[Link] (2 responses)
Yes initial setup of such a build server took some trail and error but not it's very easy to add new distribution/release. What I do think that we miss in the community is prebuilt building solutions like this.
Posted Aug 23, 2012 8:16 UTC (Thu)
by njwhite (guest, #51848)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 26, 2012 3:23 UTC (Sun)
by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152)
[Link]
Posted Aug 14, 2012 21:52 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (28 responses)
I think that what GNOME and KDE are finding out is that the old, simple desktop works really well for a lot of people and that many people are very resistant to change.
For example, the QWERTY keyboard layout persists despite the fact that it may or may not be the most efficient because people are used to it. No-one has radically changed the user interface of a car, a phone, a toaster or a camera because the old intefaces are familiar and good enough.
I think this is why many people are using things like XFCE: It's a simple, familiar, unobtrusive UI that doesn't try to impress with newness or coolness. It just stays out of your way and works.
Maybe GNOME will have better luck on mobile devices or new devises whose modes of interaction we haven't even dreamed of yet... I hope so. Because changing entrenched and familiar interfaces is incredibly hard and takes a once-in-a-generation genius visionary to pull off.
Posted Aug 14, 2012 22:30 UTC (Tue)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link] (2 responses)
It is hard to get people to adopt a better interface. It is way harder to get them to adopt a worse one. Sometimes it happens anyway (cough Java cough), but it's nothing to be proud of. Genius has nothing to do with it. Sometimes, clever marketing succeeds. Usually, it takes massively overspent hype, and luck. Whether it's your good luck or the adoptees' bad luck may be hard to discern.
Gnome, like the U.S., was an interesting experiment. Many good things came out of it. The organization itself has failed, though long after expected. It is interesting, not to say terrifying, to speculate on what will arise in its place.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 13:29 UTC (Wed)
by ebassi (subscriber, #54855)
[Link] (1 responses)
[citation needed] nice hyperbole, but I beg to differ.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 22:29 UTC (Wed)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link]
I mean, don't get me wrong, I like good snark, but this is kind of below that bar.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 1:49 UTC (Wed)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link] (17 responses)
In point of fact, the interfaces for many devices have undergone dramatic changes. In cameras, for instance, the change from mechanical to electronic mechanisms and manual to automatic focus have radically changed the interface. Even the shutter release isn't the same, since it's now overloaded to control the autofocus and autoexposure. And as somebody who grew up with a rotary phone, I can assure you that the interface there has been completely revamped.
The underlying point is that interfaces have to be changed to keep up with technology and changing expectations of what the device or system is supposed to do. Many of the usability nightmares we deal with are a result of trying to expand the function of a device without an equal expansion of the user interface tools. Voicemail is a great example. 12 buttons and a spoken list of options are not enough tools to make a good interface, which is why visual voicemail on smartphones is such a huge win. Keeping the interface stable is great for usability until you push so far that the old interface is inadequate, and then you may need a radical rethink.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 2:45 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (14 responses)
Hmm, I'm not sure what camera you're using, but my digital camera has roughly the same interface as my first 110 film camera from 25 years ago... point and press the button.
I also grew up with rotary phones, and I grant you that the mechanism to enter a string of digits has changed, but the basic interface is still the same: You pick up, dial or press a bunch of numbers (huh? Who in their right mind forces people to remember or write down strings of digits?) and your call goes through. Even cell phones are basically the same; you just have to press the green "send" button at the end.
Keeping the interface stable is great for usability until you push so far that the old interface is inadequate, and then you may need a radical rethink.
Sure, you're right. My point is that most people think the "old" interface (ie, something Windows-XP-like or XFCE-like) is perfectly adequate for desktop PCs.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 8:06 UTC (Wed)
by BeS (guest, #43108)
[Link] (1 responses)
>I also grew up with rotary phones, and I grant you that the mechanism to enter a string of digits has changed, but the basic interface is still the same: You pick up, dial or press a bunch of numbers What you describe is more the functionality than the interface. The interface has changed dramatically from rotary phones to "push-button telephone" to "carry-phone". Same is true for mobile phones if you look at them 10 years ago and at today smart phones. If I would use your description level for phones to describe computer interfaces I would say: You boot the computer, log in, start your text editor and start typing... nothing changed in the last 20 years.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 13:19 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
The interface has changed dramatically from rotary phones to "push-button telephone" to "carry-phone".
I disagree. The change from rotary to pushbutton was rather large. However, if you took a time-traveller who'd only ever seen a rotary phone and sat him in front of a touchtone phone, he'd figure it out in a few seconds. The basic idea is the same.
Smartphones have touchscreens, but still... when you want to call someone you're presented with a grid of digits and you dial. The only innovation is the address book for frequently-called numbers; dialling a new number for the first time hasn't changed in decades.
If I would use your description level for phones to describe computer interfaces I would say: You boot the computer, log in, start your text editor and start typing... nothing changed in the last 20 years.
Ummm... yes? :) OK, maybe not 20 years, but my desktop certainly hasn't changed much in 15 years or so.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 10:40 UTC (Wed)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link]
Posted Aug 15, 2012 10:43 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (2 responses)
I don't know about you, but I these days make the vast majority of my phone calls by picking the other person's name from a list of names.
Think of it as the QWERTY keyboard of GUIs – not optimal but incredibly expensive to replace on a large scale. We'll have to see how Microsoft gets on with their »Metro« effort (or whatever it is called these days).
Posted Aug 15, 2012 13:15 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (1 responses)
I don't know about you, but I these days make the vast majority of my phone calls by picking the other person's name from a list of names.
I have a dirt-cheap Huawei phone (when my daughter lets me have it) and I find it faster to dial the number than search through the phone book. :)
Think of it [traditional PC desktop] as the QWERTY keyboard of GUIs – not optimal but incredibly expensive to replace on a large scale.
Exactly. I believe I mentioned that analogy in my original post.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 6:10 UTC (Thu)
by AndreE (guest, #60148)
[Link]
Posted Aug 15, 2012 16:04 UTC (Wed)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link] (7 responses)
And I think they're a lot like the people who are pining for a digital version of the FM2. The way we use our desktops today is actually very different from the way we used them 10 or 20 years ago, but the control paradigm hasn't caught up. The number of tasks we manage today is much larger, and (especially) the number of things that can potentially interrupt us has increased radically. Our computers are a much more complex and confusing environment than they used to be, but the ability of our interfaces to protect us from that complexity hasn't really caught up.
I think a lot of the un-Unixy behavior of applications is a response to that. We now have web browsers that basically have their own built-in window managers and manage each page in a separate process. Why? Because people want to have dozens or hundreds of tabs open at once and our desktop environments can't deal with it. Our email apps have sprouted contact managers, calendars, to-do lists, and the like. Why? Because we can't build seamless apps out of mix-and-match separate specialist components well enough to make that a sensible approach. And we can't do those things because our desktops haven't kept up with the stuff we're trying to do with them. When we expand our desktops to keep up with the way we actually use them, we're also going to have to rethink the interface. I don't know if GNOME is going in the right direction, but they're right to think that what we have isn't good enough.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 18:26 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
The way we use our desktops today is actually very different from the way we used them 10 or 20 years ago
No, at least not for me.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 23:01 UTC (Wed)
by sorpigal (guest, #36106)
[Link] (4 responses)
Citation needed.
I am literally using the same interface today that I have been using since I adopted E16 11 years ago. I'm using the same theme with the same modules loaded and the same gkrellm. So, that's 10 years there. The only difference is that my resolution has gone up a lot.
20 years ago it was a bit different, but I was also on a radically different OS at the time; in 20 more years I plan to still use Linux or its spiritual successor.
I don't see any significant change in how we use desktop computers coming and I don't see one in the last decade. What we do with them may change but not how we do it.
> We now have web browsers that basically have their own built-in window managers and manage each page in a separate process. Why? Because people want to have dozens or hundreds of tabs open at once and our desktop environments can't deal with it.
> Our email apps have sprouted contact managers, calendars, to-do lists, and the like. Why? Because we can't build seamless apps out of mix-and-match separate specialist components well enough to make that a sensible approach.
> When we expand our desktops to keep up with the way we actually use them, we're also going to have to rethink the interface. I don't know if GNOME is going in the right direction, but they're right to think that what we have isn't good enough.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 6:16 UTC (Thu)
by AndreE (guest, #60148)
[Link]
Posted Aug 16, 2012 15:57 UTC (Thu)
by arafel (subscriber, #18557)
[Link] (2 responses)
I would respectfully suggest that your experience and approach is way, way outside the mainstream.
Posted Aug 17, 2012 14:46 UTC (Fri)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (1 responses)
I would respectfully suggest that your experience and approach is way, way outside the mainstream.
That's your opinion. Most people I know who've been using desktop computers for a long time use them pretty much the same way today as they did 15 years ago.
Posted Aug 22, 2012 7:43 UTC (Wed)
by rahvin (guest, #16953)
[Link]
In my opinion the interface of something like Gnome2/KDE3/WindowsXP along with keyboard and mouse is the culmination of nearly 40 years of evolution of the computer interface towards the most efficient method of input/output, and processing along with information display. What's happening with Gnome3/Unity/Windows8 (and others) is trying to revise the PC interface to be that of a touch based information retrieval device not that much different than a TV (limited input, little control and restrictions how it's used).
It frankly doesn't make sense to me. I don't doubt that over time that as each interface revision fails miserably that they will move back towards a more optimal interface, but I don't ever see phones/tablets and PC's having the same input/use characteristics because they are used differently. Anyone that thinks the PC is going to be replaced by a tablet (or they should have the same interface) doesn't use a PC for real input/output/processing.
I do think there are improvements to be made in the PC interface, but thinking those improvements need to be in the avenue of touch based is IMO crazy. Finally, a small example, the Ribbon in recent version of MS Office has been shown to be easier for new users to learn and master and once learned offers a much more streamlined and quicker use. It's been demonstrated to be better in actual user studies but at the same time it's harder for existing users to use because they are used to the clunkier menu based interface yet you've never seen people complain so heavily about it. I myself did the same after being forced to use the new version at work. Having finally learned the interface I realize it's better (very painful to admit after complaining as much as I did), but the change was brutal on existing users. Without the monopoly MS wouldn't have been able to do it, even though it's better for new users, because of the damage it does to existing users workflow until learning it.
Posted Aug 18, 2012 10:05 UTC (Sat)
by Jandar (subscriber, #85683)
[Link]
Why should that be? 20 year ago I had an established workflow on my desktop and why should I spend time to rewire my reflexes/habits every time a new craze shows up? Every now and then a new functionality enters into my workflow, but it's an evolution not a revolution. Having NOT to think about the interface of my desktop is the major timesaver. Revolutionary changes would require a lot of relearning (aka thinking) and is an absolute no-go.
Posted Aug 21, 2012 13:42 UTC (Tue)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link] (1 responses)
Interface changes are a cost not an opportunity. Radical interface changes are only seen in concept cars and quietly dropped before going into production (and when designers are too prideful to remove enough of the concepts from the concept cars in production models the result does not sell).
Consumers do not like interface changes in real life they like solid no-hassles and no-surprises execution. Gadgets with radical interface changes succeeded in spite of those changes not thanks to them (the iphone built on ipod familiarity, and the ipod tried to build on Apple computer device looks at a time no two mp3 players had the same buttons in the same place). Radical interface changes only work on TV commercials. Users do like bling and surprising looks, but only on non-functional pure decoration parts they don't have to interface with.
A fugly app like LibreOffice is getting slowly adopted because it gets the work done reliably (and is cheap). winamp and xmms had a terrible interface but this interface was stable and the software worked and that led to wild adoption at the time. GNOME 2 got happy users when it stopped trying to impose new UI paradigms and focused on fixing bugs. The most loved Windows release of all times was the NT version that got delayed, forcing developers to fix bugs for months because the scheduled feature and UI changes were already finished. Apple made a comeback thanks to Steve Jobs insistence on fixing every little thing (not because he had some magic vision, and in fact his vision changed several times, from color imacs to black-and-white ones, but because he made sure each time his people executed cleanly without cutting corners). All the server-y unix stuff Desktop people have denigrated for years have been increasing its market share in the past decade because it just worked and didn't eat your data. Working, not eating your data, and being predictable is much more a seller than half-finished software that tries to follow some abstract vision at the cost of execution.
GNOME people will get some praise and happy users the day they stop looking after the rainbow for a way to win market share instead on focusing on fixing bugs and adding features while changing the interface as little as possible. And it won't matter at that stage what interface design is in place. What makes a Rolls Royce is not the paint colour but the insane number of paint layers that ensures Rolls Royce owners do not have to bother with paint scratches ever. Software is no different.
Posted Aug 21, 2012 17:21 UTC (Tue)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link]
Posted Aug 15, 2012 13:45 UTC (Wed)
by juliank (guest, #45896)
[Link] (6 responses)
* The user switching applet only shows user names, which they don't know (seems fixed in 4.10, though)
GNOME 3 Fallback mode provides a more coherent and integrated environment than you could ever create with XFCE (apart from Totem and Eye Of Gnome, which look out place in Fallback mode, as they use the dark variant of the Theme, while Metacity uses non-dark borders).
Maybe I might have the chance to try XFCE 4.10 within the next year, and see what changed, but I don't think it can get much better than GNOME 3 Fallback mode for (my) average users.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 18:28 UTC (Wed)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (5 responses)
At least XFCE 4.8 is hardly usable for the average user I think:
My (very non-technical) parents use XFCE 4.8 and don't have usability problems. I guarantee they'd be totally lost in GNOME 3. And that's because they're used to a Windows-XP/XFCE-like desktop.
All your other points ("not styled", "doesn't feel integrated") have nothing to do with usability, which is concerned with how efficient it is to actually get stuff done.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 23:12 UTC (Wed)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link] (4 responses)
A common intuition, including mine, was the opposite (that we should theme/configure things to look like Windows). I saw lots of Linux desktop deployments that started by picking the most Windows-like theme and putting the panel at the bottom and basically going through all the settings making it like Windows. According to this one study anyway, that was not a good approach.
I can't remember where this study was from, I'm not even sure it was ever public. And not advocating swapping out your parents, if nothing else I'm sure they're used to XFCE at this point.
But I do think it was an interesting counterintuitive finding.
I expect a lot of commentary on GNOME 3 probably comes down to "not like Windows / GNOME 2"; a lot of commentary on GNOME 2 was the same. If you define "usable" as "what people are used to" then essentially all change is wrong. In some cases that definition of usable is the right one. Depends on your goals.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 1:30 UTC (Thu)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link]
There was some usability study back in the day that concluded that the Linux desktop setups that looked like Windows were harder to use, because they set the wrong expectations.
Oh, I can believe that. In my case, I'm very lucky because my parents have never used Windows. I put them on Linux from Day 1.
And XFCE looks different enough from Windows that it's obvious that it isn't windows, while looking similar enough that a Windows user can get used to it in a few minutes.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 6:56 UTC (Thu)
by jmspeex (subscriber, #51639)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:54 UTC (Thu)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link]
Posted Aug 16, 2012 7:19 UTC (Thu)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link]
This is different from the transition to Gnome 2. Occasional expressions of contempt surfaced, such as hiding the gtk_key_theme=Emacs capability and the file-chooser text entry box, but it was clear that enough core people cared about usefulness to keep the system useful. Those people seem not to be working on Gnome any more.
Gnome 3 looks prettier, in many ways, than 2, and many of the changes are, arguably, improvements. A great deal of good came out of the Gnome project. It's sad to see it go this way.
Posted Aug 14, 2012 22:22 UTC (Tue)
by guinan (guest, #4644)
[Link] (1 responses)
Then years later, Mono came along, which was once again similar enough
Then around 2009 or so I got tired of caring about Gnome, and started
Posted Aug 15, 2012 18:15 UTC (Wed)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link]
Hardly.
It will be another 10 years before the browser gets to that point.
Posted Aug 14, 2012 22:42 UTC (Tue)
by cjsh (guest, #83360)
[Link] (5 responses)
The whole article written by Eitan was the best thing I've read about Gnome lately. I hope they abandon the consumption/tablet idea and follow the content creator line. I think they could truly excel in this area.
great article
Posted Aug 14, 2012 23:02 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (1 responses)
I agree it's a good idea, but that means concentrating on applications like The Gimp, etc. and not trying to radically alter the desktop. Or even trying to develop a "desktop" at all.
I don't use GNOME or KDE as my desktop, but I use and love GNOME, KDE, gtk+ and Qt programs like The Gimp, knode, LibreOffice, Rosegarden, LMMS, Audacity and more.
So yeah! Work on applications and leave the desktop up to XFCE :)
Posted Aug 15, 2012 11:20 UTC (Wed)
by liam (guest, #84133)
[Link]
Posted Aug 15, 2012 10:49 UTC (Wed)
by njwhite (guest, #51848)
[Link]
Agreed. It gives me renewed hope for GNOME. People seem to be throwing around a lot of different possible paths for the future of GNOME, but this is the one which makes sense to me. Particularly as Ubuntu's switch to unity has recently alienated quite a few people (in my small sample, at least.)
Posted Aug 16, 2012 23:14 UTC (Thu)
by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
[Link] (1 responses)
Truly. Chasing the tablet/touch market is a losing game. First off it is a locked world where preloads rule. And GNOME isn't going to get to play there. Why? Because of the second issue, GNOME is even more resource heavy than the craptastic Java spectacular that is Android. So it would only play well on a top of the line tablet. So imagine if you will an A list vendor putting GNOME on a top of the line showcase product. Right.
It might could evolve to be a real quality product on tablets but it ain't ever going to get the chance to try. Content creators on desktops is something that is a more achievable goal.
Posted Aug 18, 2012 14:43 UTC (Sat)
by bats999 (guest, #70285)
[Link]
Posted Aug 14, 2012 23:52 UTC (Tue)
by dcg (subscriber, #9198)
[Link] (4 responses)
My distro has thousand of "apps", and unlike the iOS/Android app stores, most of them are useful, not cheap copies of the most used apps...
I don't think the Linux desktop lacks apps. Rather, it lacks the kind of things that Eitan writes about - "a focus on the production end of the New Media pipeline".
Posted Aug 15, 2012 0:03 UTC (Wed)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (3 responses)
The linux desktop lacks many specific apps that people need.
some of the gaps have been getting closed (OOo and LO have done wonders), but there are others (outlook replacement, the ability to create visio diagrams, CAD programs, etc) and the fact of the matter is that if you have even a couple programs that you can't run on your main OS and instead need to use a VM with Windows to run, it very quickly becomes easier to just use Windows for everything.
Posted Aug 22, 2012 8:02 UTC (Wed)
by rahvin (guest, #16953)
[Link] (2 responses)
Having tried every FOSS CADD package a couple years ago I can say with certainty there wasn't a single one that was even close to the cheapest 2D piece of crap commercial software in existence (there are 4th tier commercial indie CAD applications that are available for near nothing that are better than QCAD which was the best I tried) let alone offered real 3D and the precision necessary in commercial engineering.
If Linux is to succeed commercially we need commercial software. There is a lot of software that is only going to be developed as commercial software because of the specialization and work involved.
Posted Aug 22, 2012 18:37 UTC (Wed)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
They said the same thing about many areas that are now dominated by FOSS, including the OS itself (something that's far more complex than any CADD software)
Posted Aug 30, 2012 15:24 UTC (Thu)
by wookey (guest, #5501)
[Link]
I see real signs of progress in this area, after a rather bare period.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 1:43 UTC (Wed)
by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
[Link]
When you create a consumer operating system, you have to make some compromises. You have to have good support for proprietary applications as well as open source ones. Most consumers aren't interested in being part of a community. They're just interested in having stuff work without too much effort. So you make it difficult to modify the base system. No, this doesn't mean you have to totally lock down the system the way some vendors do, but at the very least, you have to make it difficult for Grandma to go off the rails. You have to have good hardware support, so you work together with OEMs. Some of them might want to pre-install applications on the system... so you let them.
People keep treating this like it's a technical problem, but it's really not. From a technical perspective, Android has everything you could want. Apps are (mostly) written in a common, safe, high-level language-- Java. Both open source and commercial third-party apps are supported pretty well. There's a touchscreen GUI that people are pretty happy with. Android has a capability-based security model. All the stuff that the GNOME guys are talking about doing for "GNOME OS" is stuff that Android has already done.
Capitalism tends to increase our isolation from the things we consume. Instead of raising our own livestock, slaughtering them, and cooking them ourselves, we go to McDonald's and buy a pre-wrapped, pre-cooked meal in a box. Instead of assembling our own PCs out of parts and hacking together a kernel and applications for them, we pick up a phone with the whole operating system pre-installed, plus a few apps.
If GNOME was successful, would it really be any different than Android is now? It's better for open source developers to push the frontiers in other ways than to chase Google or Apple's taillights.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 2:00 UTC (Wed)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link] (128 responses)
I think outsiders perceive some of GNOME's history in a fundamentally different way. Maybe it's time to try to write it down the way I remember it.
(All current developers will know this, but for bystanders, I haven't had a hand in GNOME in many years, so don't blame them for my opinion.)
Here's what was happening in the GNOME 1.x period according to me.
I was maintaining Sawfish (the 1.x window manager) and other GNOME components at Red Hat and at gnome.org upstream. We were getting a firehose of feedback from both free and paying customers. We even had some user studies.
The feedback said that GNOME 1.x sucked. Among those issues was the window manager; Sawfish was not maintained after John Harper went to Apple, and basically not fixable. One reason Sawfish was buggy is that it was so configurable it 1) could not be tested and 2) certain behaviors were _unimplementable_ (at least in practical amounts of time), due to the configurability. The fact that it was written in elisp didn't help when finding maintainers, either.
So what we did: completely overhauled GNOME to address the firehose of feedback, as perceived by the team receiving it. And guess what? This overhaul in the big picture was on-target. GNOME was not dropped from the distributions as it was about to be, and instead became the dominant Linux desktop. Bug reports and complaints about the window manager went way down, for example, from 1.x to 2.x. I know because most of them were going straight to me.
GNOME 1.x to 2.x was a _big_ win based on changes in the bugzilla firehose and talking to customers, even if you saw a lot of loud people flaming in forums.
There were some bugs and regressions in 2.0. The team building it was tiny. The work needed was huge. The big problems got fixed in later 2.x releases.
My belief about the big picture is that from 1.x to 2.x GNOME got fixed and became popular (within the Linux world), when it was widely seen as doomed a year or two earlier. People were cranky about some aspects and it wasn't perfect. It's called the real world.
This is the difference between making real, pragmatic decisions when actually doing the work, and sniping from the sidelines. People in the thick of things have to say "this matters more and this does not as much."
Part of overhauling GNOME was getting the community on the same page that we needed to focus on defaults that addressed most of our users, instead of responding to every corner-case and wishlist item that someone was going to be vocal about. This had to be done in public forums and with total clarity. That's what the stuff about "crack" was about; it was about making it clear that GNOME stood for one direction and not another one. Specifically, not the previous 1.x one. It _worked_. The culture of the project _flipped_ from http://inmyholyopinion.com/2007/05/11/gnome-vs-kde/ to the opposite.
It's the nature of open source development that users can eavesdrop on the sausage-making. Open source projects that stop communicating to avoid controversy can get in trouble.
Would I be more diplomatic and not say "crack" now that I'm older? I would think so, but I'm not sure it would be the right decision. That we were clear and memorable instead of wishy-washy seems to have worked. GNOME 2.x successfully overhauled the project.
Some respected developers (Linus is one poster child) continue to make a point of clarity rather than preserving everyone's feelings, despite their age. I don't think "your window manager option is crack" remotely competes with some of the flames on the kernel list.
For the record, 1.x to 2.x was not a "focus on removing options whenever possible" (which is _never_ what anyone said, nor what they did). I personally spent many many weeks for example on freedesktop.org and helping with the EWMH spec _just to preserve_ the ability for people to choose multiple window managers. This was NOT a given. KDE and GNOME 1.x had "innovated" window management in all kinds of nonstandard ways such that you effectively could not choose your WM or even your desktop. Those of us who worked on EWMH ensured that to this day people are running things like xmonad.
What 1.x to 2.x _was_: a fight for survival in the face of overwhelming negative reviews of 1.x from most of the _existing_ Linux userbase, who were voting with their feet. And a fight that pretty much succeeded, with many more users of 2.x than 1.x, and _far_ fewer severe bugs (based on seeing the bug traffic every day, not based on anecdotes).
We spent a ton of effort on "minority" features and config options over the years, perhaps prioritizing the ones with maybe 5-15% usage, not the ones with 1% usage, and perhaps avoiding the ones that were really truly hard to implement.
Are flamers always wrong? Absolutely not. Sometimes one needs to listen. If you're a professional developer, deciding when to listen is called "your job." I've been wrong a million times but if I were never wrong I'd never be right, either.
Keep in mind that GNOME 2.x was one big admission that according to what the world was saying, we got 1.x wrong. The "crack" talk was solidly aimed at our own previous work which we (at least, many of us) had come to believe was misguided. There are plenty of posts from me in the late 90s saying exactly the opposite of what I came to believe once I had actual knowledge and experience as a maintainer on the receiving end of the bug tracker.
I'm happy that GNOME has had millions of users on Linux and was inspired to see it on the big screen in the Mars control room the other day.
I'm disappointed that GNOME didn't get far in the big picture of Mac and Windows and iOS and Android, but in the end, contrary to popular belief, GNOME has always focused on the needs of its existing users. Blog posts (including mine) about other goals have ended in so much vapor.
I'm disappointed that we probably lost far more users to OS X than to KDE or any other competing Linux desktop. (Was that because OS X had more configuration options?)
I'm disappointed that people continue to flame about how their cheese was moved, while ignoring 99% of what the developers work on and rarely saying thank you.
By the way. I would argue that back in the day, KDE saw the flames GNOME was getting and said "oh, we'll be nice and do what these people are asking for, and everyone will flock to KDE." And I think they shot themselves in the foot by doing that. They ended up spending lots of time and energy working for fewer loud people instead of the quieter mainstream. And I think most GNOME forks and alternatives and what-have-you failed in part for the same reason. They believed that the flames reflected the bulk of users and they were wrong. Reacting to whoever yells loudest does not work. Trying to make everyone happy with the same software product does not work. Taking all feedback verbatim instead of having a consistent goal in mind does not work.
Now that I don't work on the Linux desktop I can be up-front about that sort of opinion!
I've had no involvement in GNOME 3, and I don't know the thoughts of the main developers, or have a sense of what developers are hearing from customers and users. But I'm damn glad those guys have a vision and are proceeding with it. They are kicking ass. I've been amazed at slick little details all over the place.
For me, Fedora 17 with GNOME 3 is the best Linux desktop I've used in ~16 years of Linux.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 5:36 UTC (Wed)
by aryonoco (guest, #55563)
[Link] (35 responses)
I especially liked the part about those who yell the loudest do not necessarily represent the majority.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 19:57 UTC (Wed)
by codewiz (subscriber, #63050)
[Link] (34 responses)
Finding what the majority of Linux users really wants would be an interesting exercise.
Several reviews and blogposts on GNOME3 have been very critical, but one could dismiss them as the personal opinion of haters. Phoronix ran a user survey on GNOME 3 with ~8000 respondents, but it was opt-in so the GNOME development community did not seem to take it very seriously.
I have a feeling that GNOME 3 is much more controversial than GNOME 2 ever was, but nobody knows whether it's a vocal minority or 70% of the userbase. The GNOME developers don't seem to have a process in place to collect user feedback and react upon it, which makes me wonder how they can tell what changes to the UX actually constitute an improvement.
The Gnome Foundation could spend some money to run a serious usability study on Gnome Shell, similar to the one that Sun did at the time of Gnome 1 which led to many of the UI changes we saw in 2.x.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 20:34 UTC (Wed)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (26 responses)
Moreover, throwing money at the usability issue to purchase additional expert manpower will not solve the perception problem. Changes are disruptive...even changes that adhere to expert state-of-the-art usability design considerations. Because fundamentally the userbase really does not appreciate what is and is not good usability in the same way that those trained in the art and science of usability do.
Experts in usability think differently about usability than untrained users do. And its far from clear to me that we as a userbase appreciate or even understand the value of usability experts. As users, we like what we like, we use what is familiar, we are seldom prepared to stop and think through the issues of usability as a product design exercise to meet the needs of anyone other than ourselves.
There is absolutely no way that you could take my personal preferences, design a product based on them, and then get many other people to enjoy using that product. And here's the secret that nobody in the linux using community wants to admit to themselves publicly. I'm typical for a linux user in that regard. As a breed we are conformist in our non-conformity. We are stereotypically individualists to a fault. Catering to any one of us, means not catering to vast sea of other permutations of personal preferences.
And... unlike actual shipping retail product lines, where changes can be introduced at physical product boundaries and not as software upgrades to existing physical devices...we've chosen a model where software changes are more fluidly applied to existing computer devices. We've created an additional mental burden for ourselves by taking advantage of the ability to extend the useful life of any computing device by continually upgrading its functionality with new software. But the cost of that is disruption to workflows as new software development moves forward and new UI concepts are introduced. Introducing new UI at time of purchase of a new computing device is less of a burden on the user, because there is a honeymoon period with a new device where users are willing to work with new UI as part of getting familiar with the new hardware device itself.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 21:30 UTC (Wed)
by rleigh (guest, #14622)
[Link] (1 responses)
GNOME3, for me, doesn't bring anything by the way of major technical improvement. The loss of features and gross UI changes are not compensated by any important technical gains which benefit me as a user or as a developer, unlike for GNOME2.
The main change that I can see is that from what I read of the GNOME developers blogs, mailings etc., is that the main designer and developer focus is on the superficial, the interface. The easy stuff. There's little or no major focus on the hard stuff. The core libraries, inter-process communication, application frameworks. Can I copy and paste and share complex data between different GNOME applications? i.e. more complex than mere plain text and pixmaps. Can the applications share components, embed and drive each other? Where are the DCOM/OLE/DDE equivalents for GNOME which it promised in the early days? Last I saw, this died when the last bits of CORBA were excised from Gnumeric (it provided and could embed CORBA objects, such as graphs, which could have been shared with other applications). Yet there's lots of exciting new technology out there like ZeroC ICE, which is a modern replacement for CORBA. Is GNOME even considering these problems, let alone working on them? Look at the stuff Apple is doing with technologies like Core Data; and in the UI like Core Animation. These are fairly fundamental useful technologies which all applications can make use of. Is GNOME developing anything like this? While GNOME applications share the UI toolkit, there's very little commonality under the hood--they are all essentially separate programs which can't intercommunicate, and don't share much in the way of common libraries. GNOME ceded its technical goals in favour of superficial appearance, which is very much to its long term detriment.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 21:40 UTC (Wed)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link]
That you didn't notice these things is actually quite a compliment!
Posted Aug 15, 2012 22:11 UTC (Wed)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (2 responses)
I'm not sure about that, if there were good clear data with blog posts discussing it, screenshots, etc. describing the changes and the testing that lead to the changes that would do very much to assuage concerns. There is a strong perception that the GNOME 3 design process is not being driven by science and I haven't seen any solid information to dispute that perception.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 22:54 UTC (Wed)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (1 responses)
However, if we are going to hold up the previous Sun design study from 2001 during the GNOME 1.x era as a gold standard on how to do it well...let's be realistic about what the end result will be with regard to perception by going back and really looking at the reaction to the changes made as a result of that study. I don't remember it being a hugfest. In fact if you look really closely at the history, its the Sun study that really kicked off the move to minimalist design meme that GNOME tries to really adhere closely to over the long life of GNOME 2.x and into GNOME 3.x. People want to gripe a lot about the pruning of options out out dialogs and other interface components...it started with that design study.
And that Sun study consisted of "novice" GNOME users unfamiliar with linux and GNOME... not existing GNOME users.... not those of us here right now. And that is important to keep in mind. I do not believe that more novice user testing of this sort is going to appease any of the most vocal who are chafing at the changes. I do however believe that more novice user testing will result in better long term designs which are more iOS and Android like simply because thats now the what novice and casual computer users are most familiar with.I do not assume that designs focused on the novice will be optimal for me or for anyone else here. In fact I sort of expect the opposite. And I'm okay with that. I know I'm not a good target audience... what everyone else reading this needs to understand is.. they aren't a good target either.
Posted Aug 18, 2012 10:38 UTC (Sat)
by Jandar (subscriber, #85683)
[Link]
The opposite of "optimal" is "worst". So you okay with GNOME alienating all lwn-readers in the most effective way?
Posted Aug 16, 2012 5:13 UTC (Thu)
by codewiz (subscriber, #63050)
[Link] (20 responses)
I remember the criticism of GNOME 2.x focusing essentially on 3 major issues:
1) The "spatial" file manager, with no UI to change it;
The complaints died off after GNOME was fixed to address users' requests: the "Open each folder in its own window" option reappeared and was made the default and the file dialog was enhanced so that the pathname edit box would appear as soon as you start typing, with full completion.
I'm not sure whether the printing dialog has ever been fixed, but perhaps there are just too few Linux users who are passionate about advanced printing options. Though I was surprised to see control panels to configure Wacom tablets and even color correction, stuff that few professionals need, when at the same time GNOME 3 has lost the ability to set something as basic as the font size. Makes me wonder how the GNOME design process works.
> I bet the reaction really was not all that great and not all
Are the developers convinced that history is repeating itself and all the users complaining are simply being irrational? This is a very risky assumption without solid data backing it.
It could be that Linux users are indeed very conservative and change averse, but one should also consider the possibility that Gnome Shell may be a good fit only for a subset of desktop users.
> Experts in usability think differently about usability than untrained
The problem with usability is that it's an inexact science and anyone could call themselves an expert in the field. Why can't I call myself an expert too? Do usability experts always agree when they make design decisions?
The only way to verify whether a UI change was really an improvement is testing it with real users and see what happens. In the case of Gnome Shell, there are some similarities with the GNOME 2 transition, but this time around some people seem to believe that all criticism is bogus and will stop by itself if they keep ignoring it.
Here's my prediction: all criticism *will* eventually die off... but just because all the discontent users will have moved on to some other desktop out of frustration. It could be a small loss or 80% of the current userbase. Hard to tell without any data.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:41 UTC (Thu)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (19 responses)
I'm a user. I'm not being irrational. Thus your thesis that all users are being irrational is debunked. Are some users being irrational? Yes. Do some users have legitimate concerns? must assuredly. There's no need to over generalize with the language.
And I've done nothing else in this thread but repeatedly ask that someone go back and examine the history specifically to provide data that is not based entirely on human recollection of events specifically because I have convinced myself history is repeating. I'm always open to solid data with documented methodology.
> It could be that Linux users are indeed very conservative and change
Oh I take that further. No single desktop environment is good fit for _all_ desktop users. How about that for a truism. For the same reason why we have different styles of chairs and desks, no single design aesthetic is going to be a good fit everyone. So it is with computer interface designs as well. So yeah shell is only going to be good for a subset. I really don't think anyone is arguing that its going to be the best fit for everyone so really its a bit of a rhetorical bait and switch. And I'm also telling you that those of us here are not the subset to shoot for. We are not the mainstream, our preferences will never be the mainstream, we are a very poor design target. Anyone who designs something to suit me, is designing for mass market failure. Anyone who is designing a desktop which appeals to the majority of the readership here is designing for mass adoption failure.
> The problem with usability is that it's an inexact science and anyone
Yes indeed, this really hilights one of the points I made previously about the perception of usability design. As an audience I do no think we appreciate what trained designers actually bring to the table. You clearly do not. Anyone who stands up and basically says ah that stuff is easy, anyone can be an expert at that, clearly has no idea. I really feel for the people who have actually been trained in design in our community for that reason. Constantly having to fight with people with no training who think they can do it better. Demoralizing really.
And i'm not going to name names, but I believe certain high-profile individuals have perhaps spoken out of place, abused their soapbox a bit, and spoken on behalf his private design team far too often even though he himself is not a trained designer. We don't need their managers talking for the trained designers. No more of that.
We absolutely need more of the _trained_ designers to step up and explain some core concepts to us, so we, the larger participatory community, can better appreciate the effort being made (even if we still don't like the final outcome). We must gain confidence in the skillset and the training as a profession. But in order for this to happen we are going to have to make a safe space for these people to start communicating out in the open without having to deal with you and the rest of the "I'm not an expert but I can do better than that" crowd.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 17:57 UTC (Thu)
by codewiz (subscriber, #63050)
[Link] (18 responses)
There are plenty of mainstream interfaces that I use daily with great satisfaction: Android, Chrome OS, Maemo...
Over the past year I even considered going back to Mac OS X out of frustration for the sorry state of the Linux desktop. But in the end I love free software and I'm going to stick with it a little longer in spite of the miserable user experience that I'm getting these days.
I think we should stop hiding behind the belief that Gnome Shell appeals to a wider audience than just geek. At least, not until we have data showing that the market share has been growing since GNOME 3.0.
> Yes indeed, this really hilights one of the points I made previously
I'm not saying that UI design is easy! On the contrary, I'm saying that being trained in UI design and usability doesn't make you a good UX engineer any more than studying CS automatically make a good software engineer.
The only way to verify whether a UI designer did a good job is asking users to vote with their feet. We don't have solid data, but by now there are a some hints that something might have gone wrong with Gnome Shell: lots of bad reviews, critical blogposts, forks, major distros switching to other desktops and, last but not least, lots of negative comments in user surveys.
> We absolutely need more of the _trained_ designers to step up and
Sure, I'd be eager to hear detailed explanations from the trained designers backing some of the decisions that seem arbitrary.
I understand that part of the design was meant to make our UI more suitable to tablets and smart phones. However, so far we've failed to steal any significant market share from iOS and Android, while at the same time we've lost the largest Linux distributions.
> We must gain confidence in the skillset and the training as a
Sure, let's give them some time to try their ideas, but at what point do we verify the actual results and make a decision to change strategy?
We don't have the luxury of infinite time and resources. If you do believe in history repeating itself, take KDE 4's fall: the initial release was such a gigantic fiasco that large portions of the user base switched to Gnome 2. Afterwards, the KDE developers put an admirable effort at fixing the bugs and polishing the interface, but the project did never fully recover.
Posted Aug 18, 2012 10:52 UTC (Sat)
by Jandar (subscriber, #85683)
[Link] (17 responses)
This was not KDEs but only the distributions fault. KDE had 4.0 clearly labeled as beta, experimental, not ready for production use and capable to shoot into the users feet. At that time it wasn't thinkable for me to install such a beta desktop so I was astonished to see it had found way into the major distributions.
Posted Aug 18, 2012 12:55 UTC (Sat)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link] (14 responses)
When releasing software it is important to follow a set of conventions to your target audience -- in this case Linux distributions. A "x beta", "x rc" or "(x-1).99" version number signals a release not ready for a broad audience; while "stable" or "x.0" marks software ready for distribution. In this case, KDE should have used a different version number than "4.0" if they did not want general distribution. It is not enough to say that the version is experimental somewhere.
Besides, the 4.0 release announcement contains nothing of the sort. It appears to be a bona fide major release intended for public consumption; and the KDE project seems happy that it will be included in major distributions such as Fedora or Debian lenny.
My last argument is that it is the project's responsibility to communicate to distributions. When one recipient misunderstands the message but others get it right it may be the recipient's problem; when most recipients get it wrong then it is clearly the fault of the sender. At least if the sender cares about reaching message recipients.
So please, enough with blaming distributions. A gigantic fiasco it was; so let us accept it and learn from it.
Posted Aug 18, 2012 13:59 UTC (Sat)
by Jandar (subscriber, #85683)
[Link] (13 responses)
Here one part of http://www.commit-digest.org/issues/2007-12-30/
Stephan Binner writes a reminder note about the upcoming KDE 4.0 release (in an attempt to reign in wildly over-optimistic expectations by some users):
Before everyone starts to spread their opinion about KDE 4.0, let me spread some reminders:
Posted Aug 18, 2012 16:50 UTC (Sat)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (12 responses)
Posted Aug 19, 2012 11:59 UTC (Sun)
by Jandar (subscriber, #85683)
[Link] (9 responses)
Posted Aug 19, 2012 16:00 UTC (Sun)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (8 responses)
Posted Aug 19, 2012 21:50 UTC (Sun)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Aug 20, 2012 6:21 UTC (Mon)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Aug 20, 2012 22:47 UTC (Mon)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Aug 20, 2012 22:56 UTC (Mon)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link] (4 responses)
Conclusions: do not rely on distros following development of your package; explain everything in detail in the release announcement. Do not use subtle cues; use standard version numbers where "4.0" means "stable version". Do not count on distro maintainers knowing your software intimately; go after them and explain any anomalies. They are providing your users a service packaging your software; do not expect them to also do your job for you, and above all: do not blame them for your failures to communicate.
As an upstream developer I see these things clearly, but perhaps big packages are different.
Posted Aug 20, 2012 23:22 UTC (Mon)
by sfeam (subscriber, #2841)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Aug 20, 2012 23:26 UTC (Mon)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Aug 20, 2012 23:47 UTC (Mon)
by sfeam (subscriber, #2841)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 21, 2012 7:14 UTC (Tue)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link]
Posted Sep 1, 2012 15:09 UTC (Sat)
by rich0 (guest, #55509)
[Link] (1 responses)
Distros generally ship the version of upstream that is maintained - that is the one that when you report a bug against it the bug is very likely to get fixed and posted in a new release.
Once 3.5 was abandoned, distros basically had little choice but more to 4. So then to say that it was only a beta/etc is a bit disingenuous.
Posted Sep 1, 2012 15:31 UTC (Sat)
by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
[Link]
Posted Aug 18, 2012 23:58 UTC (Sat)
by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 1, 2012 15:13 UTC (Sat)
by rich0 (guest, #55509)
[Link]
You can't abandon KDE 3.5 and then say that people shouldn't have migrated to 4. The current version is whatever keeps getting bugfixes.
Most serious software packages don't just do all bugfixing at the bleeding edge. Heck, the kernel still has full support for v3.0 and v3.4, with later versions not having longer-term promises (they're the equivalent of KDE 4 or 3.99.9 or whatever).
Posted Aug 15, 2012 21:38 UTC (Wed)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link]
I have noticed (only lately) bugs that were filed as a result of usability testing. I asked for details and didn't get any response.. so I can only make assumptions. I'm guessing that a) only limited usability testing have been performed up to now b) it will likely increase as 3.x matures c) there are various things that designers/developers aren't happy with at the moment, so likely the lack of a big test is because things are still not considered to be good enough. There are still various changes being made to existing 3.x functionality; some are hard to notice unless you really follow all the NEWS files, bugs, etc.. or have really great attention to detail). Some (don't mean Nautilus:P) of the issues people are complaining about are being changed in each newer version of 3.x. However, that is on a 6 month cycle and it sometimes takes multiple cycles to get things right. It seems some people expect changes within days. On gnome-os-list there is a list of things they want to work really well. I personally would like another big usability study after that. That Sun one was awesome. Note that various companies used to do usability testing. It was often talked about during conferences (how to setup your own small usability test).
Posted Aug 15, 2012 22:23 UTC (Wed)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link] (5 responses)
I think developers and designers often take flames and polls and the like as a data point saying "there is a pain here" -- but not as a prescription for how to solve it.
Most of the time flames boil down to the following:
This is completely understandable and I have the same emotion pretty often. I frequently avoid upgrading software especially to the ".0" release.
Sometimes, software should not have been changed. It's not better enough.
If there was some reason to change, the developer is in a tricky spot. They have to figure out how to satisfy both the reason for the change, and patch up the pain of the change. This is often genuinely hard.
Often when people are frustrated by a change they aren't willing to rationally discuss any option other than "just change it back" and that's what most of the flames end up being about. Developers may feel it's best overall (for users in general) to find a solution other than "just change it back" but if you're in the midst of being aggravated and unproductive you don't have the patience for trying to find the best answer. Having the development process out in the open just pisses people off in this situation, sadly, because they aren't looking to participate. They are just frustrated and trying to get stuff done.
It devolves into all kinds of tangents and speculations we're all familiar with (about people's motivations and what's wrong with the software industry and somehow everyone's complaints are what "the community" wants and my identity is at stake and I'm switching to XYZ and I should have been consulted and so on). Lots of drama.
Eventually somebody just has to buckle down and say "here are all the known issues and some possible solutions and pros and cons and let's figure it out," make another change that might improve matters, get feedback on that one, iterate again...
It's tempting to believe that software design can be a matter of taking a poll or doing some usability tests or some other mechanical system, but unfortunately that doesn't work. It would be nice if it did.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 1:24 UTC (Thu)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (4 responses)
> If there was some reason to change, the developer is in a tricky spot. They have to figure out how to satisfy both the reason for the change, and patch up the pain of the change. This is often genuinely hard.
Example: using 3D rendering. Hardware is already there, which can do a better job of it, relieve the CPU, lower the power consumption etc. So, changing the system to be able to take advantage of it is a good thing (while not breaking the system for setups that don't have 3D rendering). Full marks.
Example: overview. Gnome is primarily a desktop system, not a smartphone or a tablet system. Inventing philosophical reasons along the lines of "minimising distraction" (as if panel autohide didn't already exist and as if notifications could not be turned off) is an example of a change just for the sake of it. Because it was fashionable to do it. In the process, the visibility of the whole desktop was completely lost, GUI/mouse actions became more complicated, windows could not be properly minimised and users are now constantly exposed to completely unnecessary animations. It was not hard to figure out at all that there was zero need for this change on the desktop. Thumbs down.
Example: overview v. fallback mode. Depending on your hardware, Gnome 3 acts in surprisingly and almost entirely different ways. There is no functional reason for this (the main reason is overuse of animation). Both 3D and 2D versions could have been made to look more alike. Thumbs down.
Example: Nautilus type-ahead removal. A great example of a change without justification. Users tell developers that they use and like type-ahead, which is substantially different from search. Developers reply with: "it's gone anyway", because search is better (but it's actually quite something else). Thumbs down.
And so on and so forth.
If developers cannot come up with a genuine functional improvement as a result of a change, they should not be engaging in it.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 2:12 UTC (Thu)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link] (3 responses)
Nobody changes things just for kicks. Truly.
There isn't some moment where people say "OK, I can't come up with any reason this is an improvement, but I'll do it anyway."
Posted Aug 16, 2012 2:16 UTC (Thu)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link] (2 responses)
Maybe it was my fault for saying "Sometimes, software should not have been changed. It's not better enough."
What I mean is with 20/20 hindsight, in retrospect sometimes it should not have been changed. i.e. people make mistakes.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 23:47 UTC (Thu)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 17, 2012 12:40 UTC (Fri)
by codewiz (subscriber, #63050)
[Link]
I agree. I tried Cinnamon a while ago and I liked the concept, but I found it still a little rough.
Like Unity, Cinnamon probably had to patch the GNOME libraries or live with APIs designed exclusively for Gnome Shell. In recent times, multiple GNOME developers have advocated for tighter end-to-end integration across the software stack, which sounds like a polite way to say that they won't take patches from other GNOME-based desktops unless they benefit Gnome Shell directly.
The situation for distributors is less than ideal: they're being forced to either carry forked versions of upstream libraries, or ship Gnome Shell only.
(disclaimer: the above is based on what packagers are saying in multiple forums, I haven't looked at the patches in question).
Posted Aug 15, 2012 6:26 UTC (Wed)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (16 responses)
I would venture a guess it was because Apple didn't break random things from release to release for their users, as often as others did.
PS. I personally didn't switch (a bit more tolerant to breakage + really don't like OS X). But, you know what - Gnome 3 usability regressions did give me a moment of pause. Luckily I can still run mutter in fallback mode, the combo that works sufficiently "normal".
Posted Aug 15, 2012 8:21 UTC (Wed)
by AngryChris (guest, #74783)
[Link]
I last used KDE in 1997, beta 7, and when it was very CDE-like. I dropped it for GNOME 1.x (which was pretty bad, to be honest) because, at the time, I was a licensing purist. Now, 15 years later, I don't care anymore. I want something that works. I want indicators on my screen. I want multiple windows on my screen. I do not want an "attention focused" desktop. I'm back to KDE after all these years and happy again.
I miss GNOME 2.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 10:31 UTC (Wed)
by debacle (subscriber, #7114)
[Link] (2 responses)
Happy birthday, GNOME! We'll meet again.
(don't know where, don't know when, sorry Vera Lynn)
Posted Aug 15, 2012 13:53 UTC (Wed)
by juliank (guest, #45896)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 15, 2012 14:50 UTC (Wed)
by debacle (subscriber, #7114)
[Link]
Posted Aug 15, 2012 11:35 UTC (Wed)
by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
[Link] (7 responses)
Yes they do. Even more often. But they sell it as improvement with a wonderful marketing machine.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 12:06 UTC (Wed)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Aug 15, 2012 12:15 UTC (Wed)
by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Aug 15, 2012 15:49 UTC (Wed)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (1 responses)
(A question: I see people going nuts over signed executables but I've downloaded Gimp, MacVim, GnuBG, Sublime Editor, lots of homebrew tools, and tons of other open source apps to my Mountain Lion machine with zero trouble. Where do the signed executable restrictions get in the way?)
Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:56 UTC (Thu)
by cortana (subscriber, #24596)
[Link]
Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:55 UTC (Thu)
by cortana (subscriber, #24596)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 16, 2012 17:03 UTC (Thu)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link]
Posted Aug 16, 2012 17:43 UTC (Thu)
by gpoo (subscriber, #56055)
[Link]
You can expect some "breakages" in the early stages of a major release, while the UI is being adjusted.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 14:25 UTC (Thu)
by fb (guest, #53265)
[Link] (3 responses)
I am seriously considering switching to OSX after using Linux for 17 years. Nothing to do with desktop work flows, notifications or animations (either lack or presence) but applications. There are too many desktop applications which Linux lacks (at least with the feature and support level) that I find myself in need of.
I sincerely cannot get the point of so many WM changes, or so many desktop changes when we still lack applications.
[...]
But I think you do have a point wrt Apple's stability through upgrades.
Having to maintain a Linux desktop for my non-technical parents who live far-far-away taught me a lot about how the Linux Desktop is really *not* ready for mass adoption. Things break too often. Fwiw, today I was explaining to my parents that they are getting an ipad to use next to the Ubuntu laptop.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 15:02 UTC (Thu)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link]
For apps, maybe 5% of those using Linux are interested in a given app? And number of OSS developers relates to number of users because generally some users become developers. Also for apps, fewer of the users know how to code (many developers use only desktop, browser, terminal, and editors, and little else).
But _each_ app can be at least as much work as building the entire desktop. And the distributions can't afford to sponsor many apps.
And on Linux there hasn't been much success with proprietary apps.
So that's why there aren't tons of apps. (In my opinion.) In fact it's sort of amazing how many there are. I'd say most of them have only 1 or maybe 3 core developers though.
The apps with the most developers are cross-platform. (Firefox, LibreOffice)
Posted Aug 16, 2012 18:49 UTC (Thu)
by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
[Link] (1 responses)
Just curious, what apps are we talking about? I use KDE for a long time, and for the last 3 years I have suffered OSX Leopard, Lion and now Mountain Lion, just because I developed some iOS software. There are no apps in my MacBook that are better than the apps in my home and office desktops...
Posted Aug 16, 2012 20:17 UTC (Thu)
by fb (guest, #53265)
[Link]
Out of the top of my head:
On a practical note, my wife uses OSX. Using the same OS would simplify some of my `family sys-admin duties`.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 11:33 UTC (Wed)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link] (30 responses)
What frustrates me a lot is the way that the duplication of effort has resulted in deficient solutions that can't always be combined to produce a satisfactory experience. One example of this is the way that the GNOME file explorer tools (Nautilus, I presume) can't access WebDAV shares that the KDE tools are perfectly happy with. A solution might involve mixing the tools: after all, this is open source.
But then, if you want to have a sane file manager, you have to put up with the bizarre "precision clicking to select or open depending on which part of the icon or name you're pointing at" behaviour of Dolphin or instead try and use Nautilus for most file browsing and only use Dolphin for WebDAV, except that you can't drag stuff out of a WebDAV folder in Dolphin into Nautilus.
Oh, and you can't easily change the double-click-to-open behaviour of the GNOME stuff because the developers are presumably obsessed about a specific choice made in the early 1980s by someone at Apple. So, if you mix GNOME and KDE components, they behave in different ways. None of this is easy to explain to anyone.
Had the developers of these desktops collaborated properly (as promised), there would be common services for things like WebDAV - you could have simple scripts that wrap stuff like wget if you didn't have any time to write nice stuff (except that someone would come up with a strawman argument about needing to hammer a server 20000 times a second in order to support the development of a bloated technology-specific framework) - and less stuff would be reinvented in every iteration of every desktop. Maybe there'd also be common ways of configuring user interface behaviour, too.
Instead we have things like Unity with its abominable menu-stealing masquerading as innovation even though it's merely replicating a thirty-year-old user interface limitation in an unreliable fashion.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 11:58 UTC (Wed)
by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
[Link] (9 responses)
I actually like this, but I configure my Dolphin icons to "real big" so it's not a problem. But you configure out the selection marker in the "configure dolphin / general" dialog.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 12:13 UTC (Wed)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link]
Having tiny icons superimposed over small icons with potentially minimal contrast differences between them in order to indicate some action other than the one you would expect from previous experience is the result of some fairly cursory user interface evaluation activities, I would say.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 12:20 UTC (Wed)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Aug 15, 2012 12:51 UTC (Wed)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Aug 15, 2012 23:25 UTC (Wed)
by sorpigal (guest, #36106)
[Link] (5 responses)
Nice to finally meet you.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 8:07 UTC (Thu)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link]
Posted Aug 16, 2012 18:45 UTC (Thu)
by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164)
[Link] (1 responses)
The reason it is default was due to usability studies all saying single click is far easier for new users... Which is surely true, even after years and years behind both windows and Mac systems, my dad double-clicks menu items and forgets to double-click items in the file manager.
I'm surprised to this day that GNOME didn't pick up on this. The way it is solved in KDE is quite elegant imho - the selection marker is quite big with the large icons that are default.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 20:00 UTC (Thu)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link]
As far as selection markers are concerned, they should really appear as a pop-up that is offset (horizontally, most likely) from the icon/name combination in something like Dolphin, so as to avoid trespassing on the icon in a potentially non-obvious fashion for people who have to squint to see such things or who don't have normal colour vision.
Posted Aug 18, 2012 11:09 UTC (Sat)
by Jandar (subscriber, #85683)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 1, 2012 16:45 UTC (Sat)
by rich0 (guest, #55509)
[Link]
The only time I use a file manager is to move files around in bulk but with somewhat careful selection. I'd be using the shell if I just wanted to manipulate a single file or something that I could use wildcards for.
So, having to figure out how to select files without opening them is incredibly frustrating in KDE. Fortunately somebody in this thread just referenced the config setting and I changed it. Finally, sanity prevails until somebody decides I don't know what I'm doing and removes the option...
Posted Aug 15, 2012 15:25 UTC (Wed)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link] (6 responses)
If you don't want to get labelled as hate, you should take out the phrases that ascribe motivations to others. For example:
> the developers are presumably obsessed about a
Sounds pretty unlikely to be true.
> collaborated properly (as promised)
Sounds like you're saying you know exactly what the issues are here better than the developers and are implying that "the developers" (not a monolith; this is open source) broke a promise to you (I doubt there was some sort of promise to implement webdav to your satisfaction).
> simple scripts that wrap stuff like wget
This makes it clear to developers that you have no idea what's involved.
> menu-stealing masquerading as innovation
You're implying that the developers are trying to impress you with BS "innovation" claims, rather than making what they think is the best decision.
In short you do not know what the issues are here, but you're telling other people they are incompetent jerks with evil motivations. That's why you get labelled as hate.
It would suffice to say "I wish webdav worked in Nautilus and interoperated with KDE, here's what I try to do that doesn't work" (if it isn't there already, saying it in a bug tracker would be ideal).
Posted Aug 15, 2012 19:44 UTC (Wed)
by dbnichol (subscriber, #39622)
[Link]
Posted Aug 15, 2012 22:15 UTC (Wed)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link] (4 responses)
Well, that's what it seems like because double-click to do the common thing certainly isn't very ergonomic. What's the real reason for doing double-click apart from it having been done on the Mac because the Mac had one mouse button and various platforms copying it? I seem to remember Windows 95 doing away with double-clicking for many operations, but I imagine that the users revolted and this misfeature survived another generation. Thanks for using the "entitlement" argument. To take an example, I remember following the discussion about having a cross-desktop standard way for launching applications. Instead of initially doing the simple thing and having a simple well-known named program to do this, discussions about dlopening dynamic libraries were indulged instead and then nothing happened for a few more years until someone eventually wrote xdg-open which did, at least when released, all the hacks that everyone was already having to do themselves. Let that be your opinion, then. I see that you cut the bit about such things being a quick hack. They're trying to do both, although I would again argue that they're unduly influenced by the Mac: I remember arguing with people about this on the Internet almost twenty years ago, so times don't really change on this front. And they're certainly making claims of innovation in case you don't read Mark Shuttleworth's blog. Thanks for projecting a bunch of stuff onto what I wrote in order to make me look like the bad guy for complaining. Perhaps you can indicate the precise mix of criticism and unbridled praise with which people can make suggestions to projects in order to be heard and heeded because there are quite a few people who spend their time trying to suggest improvements only to be told that they aren't "designers" or don't understand the issues. I think there's an essay that covers spending time writing comprehensive bug reports only to see them closed by people who can't bear to have open bug reports in their tracker.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 15:43 UTC (Thu)
by krake (guest, #55996)
[Link] (2 responses)
You came up with wording that made it sounds like entitlement, which Havoc simply pointed out.
"Instead of initially doing the simple thing and having a simple well-known named program...."
There was just no way to create a simple program for doing that without either replicating the already existing implementations or generalizing one of the existing implementations enough to provide an acceptable dependency for a new stand-alone program.
Which naturally lead to "..discussions about dlopening dynamic libraries..." so programs could use the currently prevalent implementation without tightly depending on it.
A natural compromise in the face of a shared goal and limited resources.
"...then nothing happened for a few more years..."
The unfortunate reality was that there were simply to few resources to implement a medium term solution given that he majority of application developers already had access to a launcher framework (i.e. developers using GNOME or KDE libs).
"...until someone eventually wrote xdg-open which did, at least when released, all the hacks that everyone was already having to do themselves."
Being that someone I'd like to emphasis that this was intended to be a short-term stop gap solution because its behavior cannot be guaranteed to be stable (due to delegating to many different tools) nor does it provide most of the features application developer using launcher APIs grew accustomed to.
I find it pretty ironic that "failure of collaboration" comes up in a reply to a posting by Havoc, a person who has put unparalleled efforts into *the* collaboration enabler: D-Bus
Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:53 UTC (Thu)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link] (1 responses)
I merely stated that the inter-project collaboration hadn't produced as many results as it could have in precisely the areas where such collaboration could have paid off. Lots of people write client and server code to handle Internet protocols that doesn't need to link to a bunch of desktop or GUI libraries, but instead we have the end-user experience equivalent of one plus one not equalling two because people apparently don't want to write some service-level code without sucking in libraries that other people don't want to use. Maybe to use the word "promised" instead of "anticipated" was unwise, but my impression was that people were committed to pooling effort and not reinventing the wheel. Things like the Desktop Summit were held. Instead, we now have more dilution of effort than ever before. For your information, I don't feel entitled to anything from the KDE or GNOME developers. However, I find it very sad that where I could have comfortably recommended something like the KDE version I use every day to a new user a couple of years ago, I can only apologise for the workarounds the current versions of these projects seem to demand of their users in order to perform the same tasks. Now on the subject of opening programs... All you need is agreement from everyone that certain tools will be around to do the job. As you already mentioned, getting agreement when no-one can see the point ("developers using GNOME or KDE libs" wondering why you don't just fire up some internal mechanism or other) is pretty tough, but maybe then you have to be the one providing the stability for everyone else. I passively maintain a Python library for launching applications that pre-dates xdg-open and was recently notified that kfmclient has been renamed to kioclient in KDE 4 but takes the same options. All I need to do is to wonder briefly how hard it would be to make a symbolic link for compatibility before just getting on with adding yet another corner case provided by a bunch of people who can't even agree on a name and a bunch of standard options for a program that they and everyone else provide. D-Bus is but one mechanism that should make decoupling of, say, WebDAV access services from graphical clients easier so that the developers of the latter can leave the work of the former to others. In any case, had enabling collaboration led directly to the decline of actual collaboration, you would genuinely have an ironic situation. I didn't link these two things, however.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 18:49 UTC (Thu)
by krake (guest, #55996)
[Link]
Quite the opposite. Prior to having an established and shared service communication framework (D-Bus) the only viable options were collaboration on specifications and low-level libraries.
But it is important to understand that creating such a technology and respective application developer API and raising awareness of the benefits over its drawbacks takes some time and that having the means doesn't automatically imply replacements for existing implementations happening either.
"...but my impression was that people were committed to pooling effort and not reinventing the wheel."
I think your impression is correct and also that this has indeed happend. A lot of shared infrastructure has been created and is being used not only by "the big guys" (GNOME, KDE) but even by individual application developers.
"All you need is agreement from everyone that certain tools will be around to do the job."
I don't think any of the tools got removed or altered in an incompatible fashion, but not all tools necessarily export the same feature set (e.g. Thunderbird initially? did not support attachments in mailto URIs).
Another difficulty was that e.g. xdg-open used the best available tool for a given task, which however might not have been intended to be basically the runtime equivalent of public API (thus not necessarily being governed by the same strict policies).
"As you already mentioned, getting agreement when no-one can see the point [...] is pretty tough"
That's not what I meant. Sure, not being aware of a problem makes it difficult to see the need for a solution, but that never resulting in people blocking a solution. It just shrinks the pool of people available to work on said solution. Surprisingly those in need of the solution (e.g. people working on a technoloy stack without launcher API) are even less likely to contribute, making it even less likely to draw resources from those who are already covered.
"...and was recently notified that kfmclient has been renamed to kioclient in KDE 4 but takes the same options."
Actually kioclient is an additional tool that does have fewer dependencies (and is therefore always available, not just when the KDE workspace is installed).
"All I need to do is to wonder briefly how hard it would be to make a symbolic link for compatibility..."
Which would have made sense if kioclient had replaced kfmclient and I am sure that is what would have been done. Anyway, purely hypothetical due to stories about kfmclient's death being hugely exagerated :)
"D-Bus is but one mechanism that should make decoupling [...] easier"
Sure, but the irony I was referring to was not that D-Bus would have had a negative effect on collaboration (it had a very positive effect), I was referring to the, let say call for collaboration, being posted as a reply to a comment by a person who has figuratively enabled a new universe of collaboration.
Posted Sep 1, 2012 16:48 UTC (Sat)
by rich0 (guest, #55509)
[Link]
Why else would I be clicking on something in a file manager? I can see the possible logic in getting rid of double-click in open dialogs and such, since most apps don't support multi-select there anyway.
The only time I use a file manager is to manage my files. I don't use it to open documents or whatever.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 17:03 UTC (Wed)
by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
[Link]
All of that skips over the fact that each of those periods were complete crap at the time and we only think we had it good because we forget all the segfaults.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 18:18 UTC (Wed)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link]
I just use Nautilus for Webdav.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:44 UTC (Thu)
by cortana (subscriber, #24596)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:54 UTC (Thu)
by cortana (subscriber, #24596)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Aug 16, 2012 18:50 UTC (Thu)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link]
However, I must note, and I hope that you and/or other readers will take this as a constructive suggestion, that more needs to be done to make the user experience more uniform and/or more obviously configurable so that if people want to evaluate desktop environments and applications without constraining themselves to using the "official" applications for a particular environment, then this can be done without needing to have an intimate knowledge of every environment to hand.
Posted Aug 18, 2012 23:38 UTC (Sat)
by ebassi (subscriber, #54855)
[Link]
Posted Aug 18, 2012 22:29 UTC (Sat)
by akeane (guest, #85436)
[Link] (6 responses)
Brilliant, that should be a GNOME marketing phrase ;-)
Sorry GNOME people, you can grumble and moan and throw words like "hate" about all you want, but people have a right to make comments about your release, whether you like it or not.
Here's mine: In the olden days unix had this idea favoring mechanism over policy, i;e; pushing policy decisions up to the end user.
_My_ workflow is decided by _my_ policy as the end user, not by you GNOME devs attempting to impose one upon me by making configuration difficult or impossible to apply...
Now, if I really wanted to switch between "workspaces" using keystrokes, have to type program names to find/run them, have one thing running at time, I will use this far superior version, try it:
<CTRL>+<ALT>+<F1>
It's great! No more horrible clock bang in the centre of the top of the screen, but I can always find out the time by typing date, or surf the interwebz with telnet www.google.com 80, hell there's even great programming IDE: vi
(BTW: I'm not far off joking, I only really use X for lots of terminal windows and a browser)
Of course, GNOME devs have every right to put whatever they want into their release, that's the point of all this free software stuff.
Just as I and many others have the right to use something else and, god forbid, dare to criticize the Holy GNOME 3 project.
Posted Aug 18, 2012 22:48 UTC (Sat)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link] (3 responses)
Note that there have been few if any active gnome 3 developers on this thread. (I hedge that because I don't know for sure who everyone is.) I had nothing to do with gnome 3 for example. The current developers aren't getting involved. Probably wise.
> mechanism over policy, i;e; pushing policy decisions up to the end user.
Been meaning for years to write a blog post about the bogosity of that old thing ;-) (I've normally seen it used to explain separation of X11 from toolkit/WM/desktop, not separation of desktop from user, though...)
The problem is that "policy" and "mechanism" are relative rather than absolute terms. Every hunk of code is policy for stuff "below" it in the stack and mechanism for stuff "above" it. So the real question about a piece of code is its role (what is it policy for, and what is it mechanism for). "What does this bit of code define, and what does it leave alone, and what does it have nothing to do with"
Since they are relative terms they don't mean anything without filling in "policy for ____" and "mechanism for ____" and then it isn't a principle that tells you what to do anymore, it's just a judgment about what you want in the "____"
It can be used to justify anything because you can always claim _accurately_ that a given hunk of code is a mechanism AND a policy, you just have to put the right thing in the "for ____" to prove it. X11 is mechanism for the window manager. X11 is policy for the graphics driver.
If you take "mechanism not policy" more abstractly you could say it just means "everything should be as flexible as possible to allow the policy above it to do what it wants" and to that I'd say YAGNI. Bloat bloat bloat.
Posted Aug 18, 2012 23:46 UTC (Sat)
by akeane (guest, #85436)
[Link] (1 responses)
<cheeky banter>
What a fool they would be because they have failed to appreciate your assertion that policy and mechanism are relative and can not be neatly
However, your innovative "relative mechanism", could at least foster a spirit of compromise between the hard pressed developer and the unreasonable end user: The developer gets to pick R and G values and the end user is allowed to set the B value and finally there is peace to one and all...
>X11 is policy for the graphics driver.
Yes, thats true, I could use framebuffers if I wished instead of the X protocol, that's not "for" the graphics driver however, the graphics driver doesn't care either way what comes above it. In the same way X doesn't care what widget libary or window manager I use.
See how much choice that gives me, the end user, so far, it's _my_ policy to pick whether to use X or something else. I can choose the mechanisms I use according to my policy.
That's good, it means freedom of choice, if I want I can code something directly with X if I wanted and have it display on my desktop regardless of GNOME/KDE, etc, etc or on another destop on my desktop running either, the thing that lets me have that freedom is the clear distinction between mechanism and policy, and whilst I have sympathy with the viewpoint that finding that distinction is _sometimes_ not that obvious but most experienced unix devs can make that call pretty well.
If you use gitub do you honestly think that Linus has some hardcoded values for github's html layout in the git backend, no, that would be mad!
>If you take "mechanism not policy" more abstractly you could say it just means "everything should be as flexible as possible to allow the policy above it to do what it wants" and to that I'd say YAGNI. Bloat bloat bloat.
<more cheek>
Seriously, I do take your point that defining the boundary in some cases is not obvious, and in some cases you see that boundary only after having written a lot of code, and it can be a bit dispiriting having to rewite a lot of code (trust me I've done it more than once ;-) especially if you have external pressures like deadlines, politics etc. etc. that would be involved in having to make that decision.
Have a nice weekend!
P.S. Someone mentioned flamewars, I see nothing but a set of intelligent people arguing a conflict of interest in a calm, rational way, at least we can all agree that GNOME 3 is the emacs of desktops (ducks for cover ;-)
Posted Aug 19, 2012 11:35 UTC (Sun)
by Jandar (subscriber, #85683)
[Link]
*throwing a brick*
Emacs I can configure to what *I* want, so there is no similarity. Vi on the other hand ... ;-)
Posted Aug 19, 2012 0:17 UTC (Sun)
by akeane (guest, #85436)
[Link]
>Note that there have been few if any active gnome 3 developers on this thread.
I think both of them are busy...
>bogosity of that old thing ;-)
"old thing", how dare you!?!! Get off my lawn ;-)
Posted Aug 19, 2012 0:18 UTC (Sun)
by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 19, 2012 0:53 UTC (Sun)
by akeane (guest, #85436)
[Link]
I hope to be pleasantly surprised :-)
Alas, it has been scientifically proven that:
W < X even for very large values of W
So I'll probably just wait until 'Y' comes out!
They should have called it 'Wasteland' really, it helps conjure up images of the bleak dystopian world where all of our vital freedoms to decide where the clock goes and what font size I want are controlled by an evil and shadowy organization that evolved from the sinister GNOME clan called LORD (Lack Of Reasonable Developers)
Haha, 'Wasteland', me so funny ;-)
Posted Aug 15, 2012 18:16 UTC (Wed)
by kov (subscriber, #7423)
[Link]
Posted Aug 15, 2012 18:22 UTC (Wed)
by cunagcleas (subscriber, #29132)
[Link] (19 responses)
For me, Debian testing with GNOME 3.
I was one of the ones who complained loudly here in the flame-fest about GNOME 3 some time ago, The experience of using it daily on two laptops for six months or so changed my mind though. There's something about the way it organizes my work for me that I've come to really like and value. So apologies for the flames and thanks to the developers.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 19:33 UTC (Wed)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link] (11 responses)
I'm in pretty much the same boat. When I first saw GNOME 3, I was sure it was going to be a usability disaster. I didn't flame it publicly, but I was worried enough that I resisted updating from Fedora 14 for as long as possible so I wouldn't have to use it. When I finally upgraded (to Fedora 16), I found that it was a substantial improvement. The things I expected to be awful because they were big changes from what I was used to- a full screen app menu, auto workspaces, etc.- turned out to work well when I got used to them. It's almost as if the usability experts know what they're talking about.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 23:49 UTC (Wed)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (9 responses)
I am so glad you mentioned this, because it epitomises what is so wrong with Gnome 3 (and I am also glad you find it usable - at least some do).
Like many other desktop features, workspaces have been born out functional necessity: how to have a larger desktop with the screen you have been given. So, workspaces (or in the olden days viewports) were fashioned to represent a "zoomed in" view into a larger desktop. This necessitated the existence of a visual workspace switcher, to tell users where they were and where they could go next and about what was on other ports/spaces. It was easy to visually identify all this information, immediately. Some folks arranged their workspaces into a row. Some into a grid etc. This was a concept, born out of functional necessity. Dynamic workspaces are a visual hack, just for the sake of it. They are the equivalent of rearranging your windows when one of them is closed. No other GUI does that.
Similar with overview. On a smartphone, an overview is a functional necessity, because there isn't enough screen real estate to present both the applications menu and the currently running application(s) on the screen. Hence the home screens (which is what overview is). And, of course, once again, Gnome 3 follow down the wrong path on devices that have no such functional need (desktops, laptops).
Minimised (or in the olden days iconified) windows came out of another necessity. On a multitasking system, one often has more than one thing going on at one time. And, occasionally, there are so many that some of them have to be taken out of visual range, so that more important tasks can been seen. This then necessitated the invention of iconification. This in itself was not good enough, because iconified windows would get lost behind others. So, a taskbar was invented, which was then always visible, so that users could bring back tasks they were working on easily. Gnome 3 does away with this, but it leaves user an option to still minimise windows (in a surprising about face when compared to the rest of the system, through a configurable option). Of course, the windows then go into oblivion and cannot be brought back unless overview is entered, where they miraculously appear as normal windows. Another concept broken.
Only the most obnoxious of web sites will try to maximise your browser window. So, good browsers have an explicit option that stops such obnoxious web sites in their tracks. On the other hand, Gnome 3 window manager will now do that for you. It will maximise you windows when it sees fit. The rationale? "Displaying multiple windows at the same time means that screen space isn't used efficiently, and it means that you don’t get a focused view of what it is that you are interested in." In fact, the exact opposite is true. User should decide what is and isn't the most efficient layout of windows. Contrary to this new Gnome 3 philosophy, some people can and do more than one thing at once.
I could probably write more examples (and I have here on LWN, in many comments), but I think the above already sufficiently illustrates what I (and many others) have been trying to tell Gnome developers for months now.
So, when you say:
> It's almost as if the usability experts know what they're talking about.
I have to disagree in the case of Gnome usability experts. Strongly. Based on the above objective complaints.
Havoc can wax lyrical about Gnome 3 team and I understand he knows many of them. But, from what I see, things are not going in the right direction in many of the areas. Long standing functional concepts have been broken. And nobody seems to be listening.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 7:37 UTC (Thu)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (8 responses)
You're not presenting facts, just your opinion. I really like and appreciate how you write in detail why it doesn't work for you. But being objective on your opinion still makes it an opinion. e.g. I the workspaces work perfectly fine for me. I don't see the relation to maximization. I can move applications between workspaces (e.g. like tabs in browser windows). Loads of things are configurable. This one was configurable in via gconf-editor since early 2.x days. The default changed and this button option was still available to be changed in gconf-editor (now lately in dconf-editor). Additionally, it is now also shown in gnome-tweak-tool. That there are loads of options you can change in GNOME is not surprising at all. The complaint is usually about things appearing in System Settings or not. The option you're talking about is only available in gnome-tweak-tool or {d,c}conf-editor. I fail to see why it is surprising that you do notice that option, while ignoring the hundreds of other options. I've responded to you many many times.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 21:21 UTC (Thu)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (3 responses)
IMNSHO you are one of the largest negatives GNOME 3 has in the marketing arena, and if you actually wanted to be good for the project you'd think harder before you typed.
Posted Aug 18, 2012 11:19 UTC (Sat)
by Jandar (subscriber, #85683)
[Link] (1 responses)
You are sucked into the rhetoric of bkor. 'X does not work for me' isn't an opinion, it is a fact.
Posted Aug 23, 2012 11:43 UTC (Thu)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link]
I mean that you cannot take your personal opinions and preferences to mean anything for the general case.
In any case, usually people don't refer to their opinions as facts, do I don't get why you're having difficulties to follow what I mean.
Posted Aug 19, 2012 0:31 UTC (Sun)
by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628)
[Link]
Posted Aug 16, 2012 23:45 UTC (Thu)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (1 responses)
- broken long standing UI concepts
When I say "nobody is listening", I mean, nobody that is part of Gnome development group is providing a way out of these errors.
So, when you say in your reply that many things are configurable in relation to windows minimisation (and other things) - that is completely beside the point. There, I was really just pointing out, as a sidenote, that on a system where trivial customisations like rearranging of icons in impossible, somebody found it necessary to provide an option for a concept that has been all but butchered. The irony.
Window minimisation was a long standing concept, familiar to practically all desktop users. Gnome 3 introduced a soup of some of that stuff, but none of it is consistent or makes sense (as a metaphor of what is supposed to be happening when windows are minimised). Same with workspaces - from a clear concept, Gnome 3 went to ad-hoc visual hacks. Same with basic customisation. From clear and understandable drag-and-drop, Gnome 3 went to writing Javascript. And so on and so forth.
You may say that these things are my opinion. Maybe you see them that way. But it is a fact that many other desktop OSes (including previous versions of Gnome) use these concepts. And for a reason - users have been familiar with them for years and they work. Gnome 3 decided to break them, for reasons best described a "philosophical".
Posted Aug 17, 2012 1:02 UTC (Fri)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link]
And what I am also implying here is that not only were the existing concepts broken, but they were not replaced by anything that serves the same purpose better (and contrary to what you say, these things can actually be measured, as I explained many times before). The best Gnome developers can offer is occasional suggestions that are completely orthogonal to the problem - which is to use a different input device (keyboard).
PS. Sure, some folks have tried to minimise the carnage by providing extensions that bring back various things that were broken. However, extension are no more part of official Gnome than Firefox addons are part of official Firefox. They are certainly not part of the "official way" of doing things.
Posted Aug 17, 2012 1:34 UTC (Fri)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (1 responses)
I know I wrote on this before, but just so that we are clear:
- fact: it takes significantly more mouse/GUI actions to change a workspace in Gnome 3
- fact: it is impossible to see on which workspace you are in Gnome 3, without many mouse/GUI actions (amazingly, even with extensions)
- fact: there is enough screen pixels to overlay applications menu on a desktop screen (search included)
- fact: Gnome 2 panel had autohide feature
- fact: when minimised, windows in Gnome 3 go into oblivion
- fact: in overview, minimised windows in Gnome 3 appear as normal windows
- fact: Gnome 3 window manager arbitrarily maximises windows
- fact: it is impossible to remove/move an icon in Gnome 3 panel without writing code
- fact: every time one wants to start an app, almost every single pixel on the screen is changed in Gnome 3; this is terrible for performance when working remotely
Etc, etc.
Posted Aug 23, 2012 11:32 UTC (Thu)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link]
Your personally like to hide windows. But then your personal ideas don't make things a fact.
Or otherwise stated:
A: You like minimizing windows
But you cannot state in general that GNOME 3 is no good based on this. I'm not arguing that minimizing windows can or cannot be done. Just that you lack a 'fact' to show that something like that is needed (in general). That bit is personal. This is what I meant before with not presenting facts.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 7:00 UTC (Thu)
by moabi (guest, #77626)
[Link]
I also like the fact that tracker/zeitgeist just seems to work without hogging my cpu (unlike nepomuk/virusoso), that the volume control finds remote pulseaudio sinks automagically (especially with the advanced volume control extension, it is night and day better than kmix!). Compared to kde, it seems like gnome devs have focused on fixing the 'plumbing' rather than the bling - kudos.
A few gripes of course:
- no automatic system for updating extensions when gnome is updated
If it continues to improve at the rate it did from 3.0 to 3.2 to 3.4, I'll be very happy. While I occasionally use fluxbox on older machines and for specific tasks, gnome 3 worksforme.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 21:55 UTC (Wed)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (6 responses)
e.g. the Nautilus changes broke my workflow (aside from happening pretty suddenly). I personally don't believe the developers have enough time until 3.6.0 to get the new way of doing things fully right (not only due to things like UI freezes.. but I just don't believe you can get a new 'design' right in just go; it is like a bugfree program.. not very realistic).
GNOME shell also went through various designs before hitting 3.0.0. There are still changes being planned (e.g. the 'Applications' tab; people have been complaining about that once since the start!).
Posted Aug 16, 2012 21:22 UTC (Thu)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Aug 23, 2012 10:52 UTC (Thu)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (2 responses)
Initial impressions of GNOME 3.0 from the people testing is was hugely favourable. There was a lot of positive feedback. Only after the release there was a lot of negativity.
With the knowledge you have now, loads of decisions could've been improved. It seems that is what you're suggesting? Which comes across as a bit petty.
Obviously the people testing it were testing it because they don't mind change. But one doesn't rule out another. I believe GNOME 3.0 is great, people will love it and that change is annoying. There is no conflict in these things.
Suggest to read up on how change is usually accepted to better understand what I mean. One example is for instance change due to company restructuring. In any case, the after the fact 'one of my thoughts is right' is pointless.
Posted Aug 23, 2012 11:35 UTC (Thu)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 23, 2012 11:47 UTC (Thu)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link]
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_report/report...
Which is gone. Thankfully, the Wayback machine still has a copy:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080212092210/http://develope...
I think Sun had some other HCI work, but I don't remember & can't find anything to back up that feeling.
Point is, it'd be nice to see that level of testing guide the efforts today.
Posted Aug 23, 2012 8:10 UTC (Thu)
by reddit (guest, #86331)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 23, 2012 10:56 UTC (Thu)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link]
I believe there might be a few small changes could go in by delaying it an additional 6 months, but relatively minor things.
What does improve things is way more people using it.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 5:12 UTC (Thu)
by jmspeex (subscriber, #51639)
[Link] (19 responses)
About gnome 1, all I can say is that I can believe the code itself might have been a mess, but from a power user's perspective, I found it a lot more user-friendly to click the "advanced" tab of a config dialog, then to run gconf-editor like I had to do to configure gnome2 correctly for me.
Now, what I think might be the main issue with gnome3 is that it kept using the name "gnome" when it had nothing to do with what people knew as the gnome desktop. It seems like if developers wanted to do something so radically different, they should just have called it a different name. At least there wouldn't be the implicit statement that the new desktop environment is a continuation of the old one.
That being said, there would still be the issue of "why are all the developers abandoning the desktop we're using". That one seems unavoidable and is the main reason I'm unlikely to go back to gnome3 even if one day it bring back support for the features I used in gnome2 (and now use in XFCE). Given the track record, it just seems highly predictable that in a few years, gnome4 will be released and that it will not look like anything we're used to using. As a FOSS developer myself, I understand that gnome developers don't owe me anything. That being said, I'm a bit disappointed that the main desktop environments (gnome, KDE) are moving away from the power user work flow of many of the Linux (the whole system, but just the kernel) developers use.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 7:42 UTC (Thu)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (18 responses)
Various designers have asked to define workflows. The term power user is pointless to them, because it doesn't explain the workflow at all. If the way you do things is not understood, then as a result, when things are changed your way of doing things might become way more difficult. Note: With workflow I mean a bit more than just a list of steps. Or saying you want a certain option. Though I agree that if you don't like the direction, it doesn't make sense to use it.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 15:51 UTC (Thu)
by jmspeex (subscriber, #51639)
[Link] (17 responses)
Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:23 UTC (Thu)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link] (16 responses)
I don't think this is the right framing, honestly.
I would put three layers in the onion:
First assertion: Many people in the first category would say that "most" Linux users are in that category. My belief, however, is that this is wrong. By numbers, most Linux users are in the second category. It's important to also realize that most Linux users don't join Linux forums or read/comment on LWN or on mailing lists.
It's a mistake to go by "people we know" because we tend to know people like ourselves. For example, even within "people who use Linux," "people who hack on the Linux kernel" or "people who learned their workflow on fvwm" are pretty atypical in habits and worldview.
Second assertion: GNOME 2 and 3 are both aimed foremost at the second category (current Linux users primarily), with substantial concessions/consideration for the first category. They may dream of and talk about the third category, but very little actual action (rather than words) has ever made progress there.
Contrary to corbet's original article, I think most of the flames around the desktop are between the first two categories, and most of the rationale for controversial desktop changes arises when thinking about the second category. The third category is mostly hypothetical, and even when people talk about it, they tend to assume those users are much more like the second category than they truly are.
So that's my opinion (I think based on decent experience, but you can choose to believe it or not).
Obviously I'm oversimplifying the categories a little bit and you could get arbitrarily precise. But I just disagree with the framing of "existing users" vs. "mainstream" because I think the fight between the first two categories of existing user has always dominated, and in fact that fight has actively blocked efforts to do anything toward the mainstream. The middle category is portrayed as some kind of crazy dumbing-down radicalism already, so going so far as to make the desktop _actually_ usable to _regular_ people would be NUTS. ;-)
Posted Aug 16, 2012 17:11 UTC (Thu)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link] (5 responses)
Even efforts to appeal to those developers on OS X would show up as "more radical" than historical GNOME efforts, GNOME 2 for sure. GNOME 3 is maybe trying to push this boundary.
The Overton Window (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window) in the Linux community relative to desktop design is really in an extremist spot relative to the wide world, basically, and always has been.
In general my feeling is that something separate from GNOME is the way to go for true mainstream users: things like Android. But a lot of GNOME and Linux technology could be useful of course.
In the meantime, again, I just don't agree that the flames are power user vs. mainstream. They are about degrees of hardcore within existing Linux users.
Posted Aug 17, 2012 0:01 UTC (Fri)
by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
[Link] (4 responses)
I'd like to disagree. I admin a lab environment in a public library. It is running GNOME2. It works, the sort of general public you get in a rural public library setting use the machines with few problems. I get the occasional complaint when they can't install some Windows app, but no lab setting would allow that sort of thing even if it were Windows PCs. Everybody is basically happy.
I want you to imagine putting GNOME3 into that setting. Now I see one of two possible answers you can give:
1. Sure, that is a great idea. I'd disagree but ok we can disagree. Heck, if you or one of the current core gnome devs actually said that I might even be tempted to run the experiment and find out. It wouldn't be that hard to convert a couple of machines, put a 'try this, it's new!' sign on em and collect feedback.
2. Or you have my reaction, which is "Are you nuts?" At which point you might want to ask yourself whether that just might be a problem.
Every time GNOME3 comes up somebody says "sure it brought my work to a halt for a week|month|whatever but then I figured it out and now love it!" Just can't see telling that to random people off the street who just want to use a computer for an hour.
So we now have in GNOME3 a UI that while a few users like it, most existing users are (at best) indifferent to it and new users will be so confused by it that most won't ever find out if they like it.
Posted Aug 17, 2012 1:55 UTC (Fri)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link] (3 responses)
Look at how much more effective iOS was as a strategy for Apple than OS X.
I agree with you that if you're setting up a computer lab for occasional walk-in use it's nice to just be more or less like Windows. Or just install Windows. GNOME 3 doesn't seem like the ideal design for that. But I don't know how the current developers think about this use-case.
Posted Aug 18, 2012 15:43 UTC (Sat)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (2 responses)
If Gnome 3 isn't for the old-timers like me, and it isn't for current osx/windows users, and it isn't for school computer labs or corporate desktops, and it isn't for library walk-ins, then who is it for? Honest question. I'd love to know who the gnome project has in mind when evaluating upcoming changes.
Posted Aug 18, 2012 16:03 UTC (Sat)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link]
Posted Sep 1, 2012 17:04 UTC (Sat)
by rich0 (guest, #55509)
[Link]
Tablets just don't make sense, since almost nobody replaces the OS on them with something different. About the closest I've seen is maybe running something else in a chroot, without X11. Getting Gnome on one of those is a real pain anyway with all the proprietary drivers and great variation in hardware. They aren't like your typical PC motherboard where no matter what you can at least get the thing into VGA mode using the same IO ports you'd have used on a 386.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 21:33 UTC (Thu)
by jmspeex (subscriber, #51639)
[Link] (6 responses)
I don't think anyone's really complained about gnome trying to do something that "casual Linux users" like. The problem was the part about removing a large number of features that were previously used by developers or what you might call "Old-time super-die-hard Linux users". I sincerely thought gnome had learned from (what I consider to be) its mistakes in gnome2, but it seems like gnome3 went even further. Regardless of whether you think the new directions are good or bad (and you know my opinion on this), I have so far found very few examples of software projects benefited from "starting from scratch with something new". And of course, gnome is far from being alone in what I think is best described as the CADT model.
On a different topic, I think I'll actually try an experiment with gnome3. My wife has been a "mainstream Linux user" (she mainly uses OO.o and Firefox, and would still be using Windows if it wasn't for me) for about 5 years now and has been using gnome2 all that time. I'll see what her reaction is when I expose her to gnome3 and how long it'll take her to figure out how to get things done. Any guesses based on previous studies?
Posted Aug 16, 2012 22:10 UTC (Thu)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link]
I'm not someone who had a hand in GNOME 3 so I don't know the rationales. Nor have I followed most of the flames about it, nor been immersed in Linux user feedback lately, other than myself. So I've been trying to stay out of any debates about how GNOME 3 works in specific. I don't have a lot to say other than "it works well for me" and I know I do a lot of things differently than most people.
From general knowledge I would expect that anyone switching to GNOME 3 will hit speedbumps and initially be annoyed. I'm sure your wife would be. This is the cost of any big change. Whether the change is worth it in this case requires knowledge that I don't have.
It's easy to say CADT but it's also easy to point to countless technologies that became old and stale and were crushed by newer replacements. There isn't some easy guideline, like "never" or "always" change things. "It depends."
fwiw, I know enough about the tech to tell you that GNOME 3 is not from scratch by any stretch. GNOME 1.x -> 2.x preserved a lot less code. GNOME 3 is essentially a new UI in the window manager (but keeping a lot of existing tricky WM logic from Metacity), dropping some deprecated stuff, etc. What changed is very visible but not necessarily that huge code-wise. See also http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000356.html
I'm not trying to tell anyone that GNOME 3 will definitely succeed. There are just certain arguments about it that I think are wrong.
The bottom line is that success or failure, just as with GNOME 2 or anything else, will come down to detailed judgments about specifics. The developers will have to get it right, or not.
I wouldn't venture to say whether it's on the right path, on balance, without better visibility and immersion in the strategy and the feedback. For GNOME 2 I had the daily feed of raw information, now I just have my own usage and occasionally reading an article like this one or whatever.
Posted Aug 16, 2012 22:33 UTC (Thu)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link] (4 responses)
It doesn't mean that if you're getting flamed you're going to succeed, but it does mean that you _might_ be right to do something that gets you flamed. You also might _not_ be right. That's the hard part. One needs to figure it out.
Posted Aug 17, 2012 0:38 UTC (Fri)
by jmspeex (subscriber, #51639)
[Link] (3 responses)
The bottom line is that this development method (and KDE is just as guilty as gnome) leads to long periods where the software is much worse than it should be. So by "learn from gnome2" I meant "learn to avoid these long periods of regression". I now realize that "it's a feature" and that even if gnome3 ever becomes as usable for me as gnome2 was before the "rewrite", it would only be temporary because by the time it works for me, all developers will have moved to gnome4, which will break the features I use.
I especially don't see how it needs to be that way. You can implement a gnome-shell like feature on top of gnome2 and make it optional (or even by default, I don't care). You can make the wm evolve without breaking everything. And more importantly, you don't have to make all these changes at once and you don't have to ditch the old behaviour. This means 1) people have time to get used to the changes when they like it 2) there's a chance to react when you're going in the wrong direction, and 3) you avoid bad regressions.
Posted Aug 17, 2012 1:43 UTC (Fri)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link] (2 responses)
If nothing else: there are very few developers doing quite a lot.
I don't think the kernel is directly comparable; one reason is 100x more developers, but another reason is that evolving UI is a different problem from evolving code. GNOME 2 to 3 evolved the _code_ quite gradually and smoothly with no big rewrite.
I'm trying to think of examples of UIs that gradually evolved between two pretty different states like GNOME 2 and 3, and having trouble. But maybe there are some interesting ones out there. I guess Apple is currently doing some sort of make-OS-X-more-like-iOS-in-each-release thing according to the media but I haven't tried it out myself.
Posted Aug 17, 2012 5:44 UTC (Fri)
by jmspeex (subscriber, #51639)
[Link] (1 responses)
In the end, I think the problem isn't even just for users, but for developers as well. From 1999 to ~2005, I wrote and maintained an application that had a gnome front-end. All I can say is that it was a rather painful experience. The API itself was OK (except for being C rather than C++, but I could deal with that) and it didn't take too long to get something working. The real problems came with maintaining the code with ever-changing APIs. Part of that was the gnome2 transition, which not only changed how some widgets behaved (it's OK for a major release), but also completely removed some widgets (GnomeMDI for example, which was supposed to be "the right way"). Even after the transition, APIs would keep coming and going. Oh, we're no longer supposed to use the gnome canvas, there's something new instead. Need graphs? Use GtkPlot, no use Guppi, oh wait we rewrote it and Guppi2 is much better, no but Guppi3 will be... You would never know which API you could trust to not end up being deprecated in 6 months. I stopped being involved around in that project around 2005, at which point the other main developer was working on a Qt frontend. (I still work on FOSS, but fortunately I haven't have to work with GUIs since then)
Posted Aug 17, 2012 6:54 UTC (Fri)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link]
In OSS one can only do so much. The libgnomeui/GnomeMDI stuff took a long time to reach consensus. So for example, in January 2001 I was apparently telling people not to use it:
There's more consensus/process/cultural-norm now than there used to be.
I was surprised by it just now, but libgnomeui appears to still be on my Fedora 17 system. So the ABI remains to this day.
Posted Aug 17, 2012 16:17 UTC (Fri)
by Company (guest, #57006)
[Link] (2 responses)
Now, if I look at those 3 groups you outlined, they fall into 3 categories when they talk about their OS: The first group writes blog posts and articles and even builds whole websites around this, and the other 2 groups just go "What's an OS? Why should I care?"
That in turn means that you have to market your OS (at least on technical grounds) exclusively at the first group. In fact - and that's what Fedora found out - if you rely on contributors, they will only come from that first group. So I would argue that the other 2 groups do not matter at all for the success of GNOME.
But what has instead happened in the GNOME world is that we use the silent majority (your 2nd group) as an excuse whenever someone complained. When someone complains about the removal of their favorite feature, we tell them "it's confusing for the majority of users" - usually without being able to back that up. I have not seen any numbers at all. We don't even think about collecting any data.
Posted Aug 17, 2012 17:46 UTC (Fri)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link]
I'm not a believer that decisions can be made mechanically through data collection. I do believe that the right kind of data is an important input into judgment and experimentation.
I think it's wrong to say there's no data now. If a developer is reading feedback, reading bugs, looking at how everyone around them configures their desktop, running the occasional user study, talking to customers if they're at a company, using the software themselves, etc. then they are getting a lot of data. It isn't a "study" but there's still a lot of basis to identify and figure out problems.
When I was actively maintaining metacity then I had FAR more information about how it could work and why and what kind of people would like solution A vs. B, than I currently have about gnome-shell or other WMs. If I were suddenly maintaining some other WM today, I'd have to spend months immersed and learning before changing anything much.
The point is that as a maintainer, I felt I had lots of decent information to base decisions on, and as a not-maintainer, I don't feel I have that information anymore.
There's this fantasy we all sometimes have that it can be a science and/or the answers are clear and cut-and-dried and/or that the developers could "prove" to us that they are right. But it's just too complex for that.
The alternative to "completely mechanical" is not "completely random/subjective" though. There's still a lot of room for good or bad judgment, based on good data or not. "Judgment" is not the same as "subjective opinion."
More data can always be good (with privacy protections in place, wouldn't it be great to auto-collect from all Fedora users which config options they had changed and what desktop they used, for example? that would be handy and 10000x more valid than a web poll).
Again: I'm not trying to get into whether project XYZ's judgment about topic ABC is _correct_. Judgment can always be wrong. What I don't agree with is what many imply, that judgment is the wrong _process_ and could be replaced with something more mechanical.
On the specific issue of whether "the silent majority wants this" can be an all-purpose excuse: it certainly could be used that way. When I was daily immersed in metacity-related data, I think I had a reasonable basis to know what was of general 80%-ish interest and what was one or two people or what was 15%-ish of people. So I would think the current GNOME maintainers also have some decent data on that front. But _could_ they ignore the data, use "silent majority" as an excuse and not really think it through? Of course they could. Do they? I don't assume that by default.
Re: marketing.
Perhaps the make-or-break marketing thing for Linux desktops is to be included in distributions, especially by default. If GNOME were a for-profit company and I were CEO, then getting Ubuntu back on board would be on the top of my list. Distributions are where the ... distribution ... is.
Re: "confusing"
A little tangent ... lots of times "confusing" is not a good way to think about UI-goodness. I say it too, but "relevant" or "appropriate" would be better metrics.
One reason is that "not confusing" does not mean "good" (problem = "I really quickly understood how this works, but I don't want to do what it does"). "confusing" does not always mean "bad" either ("oh, now that I get it, this will save me hours of time"). The "confusing" dimension gives little direction. (This is a limitation of "how long to do the task" user studies...)
Another reason is that "IQ" or even "computer savvy" isn't the relevant distinction among the groups. It's more like "what previous UIs do I have experience with" and "how much do I like to mess with the computer vs. focus on other things." I really dislike narratives around "power user"/"dumb down" because they imply some type of progression or ranking, when what you really have are people who care about different priorities or have a different set of life experiences. To get a relevant/appropriate design you have to think about that.
At one point long ago we were trying to make the "tweak tool" UI be a "people who are used to Unix" UI, like "Unix options" or something. That had some other pros and cons I don't remember, but one "pro" is that it makes clear what the UI is supposed to achieve, while "it's for power users"/"it's for confusing stuff" really does not. If it's framed positively like that then you can start saying "what are all the things Unix users will be used to," etc. and try to get that stuff presented nicely.
Posted Aug 19, 2012 17:24 UTC (Sun)
by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628)
[Link]
I was quite active in the "grumpy editor review" post some time back.
Of course, our efforts could have been a little more aggressive. I agree that marketing could be a little better than it was, but it wasn't like that there was no efforts made. Marketing team tried to do best there with presentations at conferences, giving out live cds, participating in social networks. There has been a lot less negative feedbacks on the social networks than through older channels like slashdot (which is a loss), lwn.net etc.
Posted Aug 24, 2012 9:25 UTC (Fri)
by vasi (subscriber, #83946)
[Link] (2 responses)
I've always been puzzled at the extreme conservatism of many desktop Linux users. Back in the beta days of Gnome 2, I remember reading on Slashdot how anti-aliased fonts were sure to be slow and blurry and yet another symptom of the dumbing down of Linux desktops. Nowadays, you never hear anyone clamouring for a return to non-aliased fonts—I guess all those folks are now busy complaining about needing an extra key-press to access the "Shutdown" menu item.
The experimentation in desktop Linux makes now an exciting time. This doesn't mean I'm always 100% down with every decision Gnome takes, but I'm interested to see where things go. Props as well to all the other innovators, like Unity and KDE4, and also to the MATÉ project for actually stepping up and maintaining the desktop they want instead of just whining about things.
Posted Aug 26, 2012 15:18 UTC (Sun)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link] (1 responses)
That is something that the GNOME project apparently have not yet understood: we are not all innovators. In fact the majority of people are conservative: they don't like surprises.
Posted Aug 26, 2012 15:29 UTC (Sun)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link]
Making a change optional is frequently, though not always, _very_ impractical. Especially without unlimited resources but often even if you did have that.
Everyone knows that people don't like change and that change breaks some things. The question is how to handle that without being CDE or Blackberry or some other technology that was destroyed by the new and different.
Suggesting that change is always or never OK is not a useful guideline for people who need to make real world judgments.
Posted Aug 15, 2012 10:56 UTC (Wed)
by marduk (subscriber, #3831)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 17, 2012 18:54 UTC (Fri)
by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404)
[Link]
Yes, I know the above was posted before a lot of the other stuff..
interesting..
Happy Birthday Gnome! :D
Posted Aug 22, 2012 9:07 UTC (Wed)
by rahvin (guest, #16953)
[Link] (2 responses)
In October of this year Microsoft is going to shoot themselves in the foot with a 80mm howitzer. I fully expect Apple to follow through and do the same but much worse with the next version of OSX.
First, Windows8 is going to be a user productivity disaster, it's going to be a total failure in the business sphere and will likely make Vista look like a raging success. Combined with Metro and MS's insistence that no application built to the metro interface can be sold through any forum other than the MS application store (do you think Adobe is going to want to give MS 30% of every software sale?) along with the lockdown and touch based interface that is going to absolutely destroy peoples ability to get real work done you're going to have a system that will create a viable opportunity for competitors that exploit it.
Second, I fully expect Apple to double down on this and go a step further and basically turn the next version of OSX into a version of iOS that is completely and totally locked down (they put the foundation in place with the current version) as I believe their top management has decided (mistakenly) that the PC is going to die and will be replaced by tablets and phones.
These two events are likely to present an grand opportunity to capitalize on these combined failures. Moving forward and getting a system in place that creates a standard upon which commercial software vendors can operate might finally allow Linux to see broad PC adoption and significant market share. The content creation paradigm that Apple has dominated for decades has been slowly being eroded by bad decisions on Apples part, much has moved to Windows as of late (Adobe now pushes windows as the primary version) but nothing is certain yet. There is a grand opportunity to step in as the alternate Windows replacement that is more like OSX while MS shoots themselves in the foot then be there to take the rest of the market when Apple abandons rationality.
MS is slow but generally corrects bad decisions in the next version because they are very in tune with the business community after all the bad feedback comes in. The colossal failure of Windows8 will only present an opportunity until Windows9 (probably a minimum of 3 years). If Linux distributions want to capitalize on this they need to be waiting in the wings in October and be in active discussion with Commercial software vendors, OEMS and businesses in the content creation business right now. There is already a foundation in place in specific segments (Blender for example) and if properly executed it could be possible to take most of the content creation business. What probably needs to happen is one of the distributions (or all/some of them in cooperation) need to start the discussions now.
I'm not sure what it will take to succeed, maybe cleaner standards and compliance by the cooperating distributions or maybe it will take something like Wayland to make it happen. Not being a software developer I can't say, but I do see an opportunity that I think is highly likely to happen. The only way to succeed is to figure out what it will take to succeed before MS fires the foot shot in October and to move rapidly shortly thereafter to be in place with a content creation alternative before Apple fires the 120mm Howitzer into their foot.
I am curious if anyone else has seen the disaster/opportunity I see coming and what their thoughts are.
Posted Aug 22, 2012 18:40 UTC (Wed)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (1 responses)
It may speed up high speed video things, but really, current desktop X systems are fast enough for 99%+ of the video stuff that people need to do.
Posted Aug 22, 2012 20:22 UTC (Wed)
by renox (guest, #23785)
[Link]
Posted Aug 23, 2012 6:42 UTC (Thu)
by elvis_ (guest, #63935)
[Link] (2 responses)
The irony, GNOME already WAS the platform of choice for many content creators, we call them programmers! Ones who wanted a powerful customisable desktop environment. Why chase an audience when you already had one that loved you?
Posted Aug 24, 2012 21:02 UTC (Fri)
by Zizzle (guest, #67739)
[Link] (1 responses)
The GNOME devs have been saying that the old crufty Linux user base is not something they want to cater to anymore. That there is a massive untapped market of new users if only they make it take more clicks to launch an app or switch virtual desktop.
Havoc even hints at it in one of his posts above.
Ok, so you have made it clear, GNOME 3 is not for old time Linux users or power users. You don't care about losing that part of the user base. But they are typically the ones who write code.
So what desktop will the application developers be using? What desktop will the kernel developers be using? Not GNOME 3 - no one wants them there.
Posted Aug 26, 2012 20:48 UTC (Sun)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link]
Within _existing_ Linux and GNOME users, in my view there's a substantial divide about the Linux user interface. Most fights about desktops have been _within_ the existing userbase. I elaborated more in some other comment earlier.
I don't agree with blaming changes on "massive untapped market." When complaining, people like to claim that "most existing Linux users" are on their side. For GNOME 1->2, I think we have enough history to say that those people were flat wrong; GNOME 2 was dominant and successful without reaching any massive untapped market. Instead, it became popular with "most" (at least "many") existing Linux users.
GNOME 3 remains to be seen, but I think it's worth noting that the similar contemporary claims about GNOME 1->2 turned out to be wrong.
It's very dangerous for any of us to over-extrapolate from our own experience.
Posted Aug 24, 2012 19:02 UTC (Fri)
by markhb (guest, #1003)
[Link]
Posted Aug 24, 2012 21:09 UTC (Fri)
by Zizzle (guest, #67739)
[Link] (2 responses)
It seemed like GNOME 3 was rammed down our throats.
I'm sure if Fedora and Ubuntu and SuSE came with both, there would be a lot less complaints.
"Oh this new GNOME is not quite there for me, I'll keep using GNOME 2 until it is."
MATE was forced to waste a heap of time renaming every executable in GNOME 2.
Also I think it's foolish to assume that history is repeating. Sure there was a lot of flaming around GNOME2. But it was clear that the features were indeed coming back and things would get better.
With GNOME 3 it seems more like the devs are willing to say "We don't want your type around here no more". That moving icons or configuring the font size is something ridiculous to want.
Posted Aug 26, 2012 21:15 UTC (Sun)
by hp (guest, #5220)
[Link] (1 responses)
(btw, just compile one of them with a --prefix and I'm sure it could be made to work. The only problem is FHS fundamentalism.)
> But it was clear that the features were indeed
It wasn't! A lot of features ("features"?) never came back.
> Also I think it's foolish to assume that history is repeating.
FWIW I agree that it's foolish to _assume_ this.
However. I also think we can say that people thinking/saying the same things about GNOME 2 were _wrong_. So I think it's also foolish to assume that similar comments are now on-target.
Now, I agree. GNOME 3 _may_ turn out badly.
But it won't be for the _reasons_ most people are talking about here.
We know from experience that the "methodology" Linux discussion forums have for trying to understand desktop UI changes and their effect is flawed.
It's because commenters have a lot of wrong "folk models" about what makes a good UI and what "most people" are like and so forth, which are simply not accurate. Commenters also aren't able to see into various tradeoffs (both design and resource based) that become a huge factor in real life outcomes. And nobody can predict what "batting average" developers will have in making the right judgments; or what random external factors will get involved.
I think a lesson from GNOME 2 is that flames and "widespread outcry" can be wildly wrong, because we have GNOME 2 as an example of success despite that.
GNOME 2 doesn't give us evidence that flames are _always_ wrong, just that they _can be_ wrong. So for GNOME 3 it remains to be seen.
However: here's what it means for the GNOME 3 developers. They should not "listen to" the flames. They may want to _extract information_ from them - there's some content there, about certain users. But they should not "listen" in the sense of doing exactly what those flames are advising.
They may get it wrong, or not. But that doesn't mean using judgment was a mistake, just that when using judgment, one can be wrong.
Posted Aug 27, 2012 3:15 UTC (Mon)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link]
The features that lots of people cared about (printer settings, fonts, focus follows mouse, keyboard layouts, ...) did come back. This was definitely a sign of success, but perhaps it would have been better if they had never been taken away? Hard to say.
Also, you seem to be saying that anyone who liked Gnome 2.32 was wrong to dislike Gnome 2.0 (or that the success of 2.32 demonstrates the success of 2.0?). They're not the same beast. Gnome 2 improved a huge amount during its earlies and teens.
Other than those points, I totally agree, especially about not overreacting to flames.
It would be nice to be able to use Gnome 2.early or 3.early but both are pretty tough sledding... Maybe this is an intentional part of its development model? Shed hardware, users, and features in one giant release, then gain them back over the next few years. Maybe I should just plan on not being able to use Gnome between the second and fifth year of each decade. :)
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
Free software in app stores
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
Everything that makes it easier to write and distribute proprietary software on Linux makes it easier to write and distribute open source software on Linux.
For technical stuff, maybe so, but there are obviously licensing issues that can make it easier or harder to write proprietary software. GNOME's choice of LGPL rather than GPL for a lot of important libraries is an example of a licensing decision that makes it easier to write proprietary software without having a substantial effect on the ease of writing open source software.
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
- A policy of no refunds for any reason (such as the software not working at all) Their store was very confusing for mac users on initial release, and I purchased a windows-only program on the mac without warning or explicit notice. At this point their software did not offer any way for me to download the software at all, and yet they refused to refund.
- A historical de-facto policy of trading transgressions == all your software is disabled. The notable examples were people that purchased games in one region (for a low price) and gifted them to people in other regions (where the price is high). People who did this frequently were presumed to be going around the pricing scheme and had their entire account locked (all software disabled). Valve has since changed their stance on this specific issue, but obviously they have and are willing to use a "turn off all your software" button. Does that seem right to you?
- A refusal to engage in a realistic fashion on billing irregularlities. Their common practice is to just point fingers at banks, paypal, etc with no backing provided data, leaving the problems entirely non-actionable for the end user save by reversing charges (if the credit company is willing) or legal action.
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
The GNOME project at 15
The Desktop
More to the point, making a better interface is incredibly hard. Thinking you have succeeded is no indication of success, but thinking you couldn't fail strongly predicts failure.
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Gnome, like the U.S., was an interesting experiment. Many good things came out of it. The organization itself has failed, though long after expected.
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but the basic interface is still the same: You pick up, dial or press a bunch of numbers (huh? Who in their right mind forces people to remember or write down strings of digits?) and your call goes through.
My point is that most people think the "old" interface (ie, something Windows-XP-like or XFCE-like) is perfectly adequate for desktop PCs.
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Hmm, I'm not sure what camera you're using, but my digital camera has roughly the same interface as my first 110 film camera from 25 years ago... point and press the button.
I'm using a DSLR. If you compare the interface of my Nikon D800 to an older, mechanical camera like a Nikon F2, and the interface is radically different. The mechanical cameras had a handful of controls- aperture, shutter speed, film speed, timed release, manual release, and some related to film handling- that were placed where they were because they were mechanically coupled to the internal devices of the camera. The newer digital cameras have most of the old controls (obviously not the ones for film handling) but have moved them because they're coupled electrically rather than mechanically. They've also added a whole bunch of new controls for things the older cameras didn't do- metering mode, focus mode, bracketing, picture review, etc.- and many of those new functions overload the basic shutter, aperture, and shutter release controls. There's also a menu system that lets you customize the interface and access less frequently used functions. If you set it up correctly, refuse to use most of the controls, and limit yourself to older lenses, you can dumb it down to the point that it functions pretty much like an older mechanical camera, but that's like saying that GNOME is just like a VT-100 because you can open a maximized terminal window and ignore the GUI completely.
Sure, you're right. My point is that most people think the "old" interface (ie, something Windows-XP-like or XFCE-like) is perfectly adequate for desktop PCs.
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FluxBox solved this problem with tabs at the WM level, it's just too bad there wasn't a spec everyone could implement. Every time an app tries to make the WM be a WM (e.g. GIMP) people ask why the app isn't being the WM. Maybe there's a lesson to be learned about what people want.
All attempts to build a system of such components has failed, GNOME's attempt included. KDE was more successful, but even they seem to have de-emphasized user-defined apps based on throwing kparts together. I'd love to see it, but I'm skeptical about how possible it is.
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't helping, especially since there is not yet an agreement on what (if any) problems exist.
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> I adopted E16 11 years ago. I'm using the same theme with the same modules
> loaded and the same gkrellm. So, that's 10 years there. The only
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Hear, hear. In the early days computer interfaces had to be designed with real-world metaphors in mind, because users were unfamiliar with them. Nowadays it doesn't matter so much; good designs are not good because they appeal to computer newbies, but because they offer no surprises to existing users. Smartphones are quite new, but we had many years to adapt to touch screens in kiosks, ATMs and other finger interfaces; Apple (and other manufacturers) just followed the trend to its logical conclusion.
Pure wisdom
The Desktop
* GTK+3 applications are unstyled by default. Given that you most likely need to use GNOME components to make the desktop somewhat usable, you need new themes.
* It does not feel "integrated" in any way.
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There was some usability study back in the day that concluded that the Linux desktop setups that looked like Windows were harder to use, because they set the wrong expectations.
Just curious, do you remember what "type" of users were targeted by this study? Were they "average" users, users who were new to using computers, power users, ...? There seems to be a tradeoff here because most (not all) Linux users happen to be a lot more tech savvy that the average computer user. Now, you don't want to design an environment that's only for power users, but at the same time, ignoring the majority of the current users is probably not good either. How was this trade off considered?
The Desktop
Certainly some complaints about Gnome 3 say it is not like something else. Dwelling on that is an easy way to ignore the real message: it is not working even as well for those people as that "something else", despite that the "something else" is (like everything) a mess. If Gnome 3 really were better, then the natural response would be to point out how people could get their work done more quickly and easily the Gnome 3 way. I have never encountered such a response. Every time, instead, it's been one of "you don't need to do that" or "nobody here cares if you need to do that". Those remarks have been expressed about practically everything I do. As a refrain it gets old very quickly.
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The GNOME project at 15
for Gnome in any language you wanted, because all the ones that
mattered had bindings, although Guile scheme was the Official glue
that held things together. But most importantly, there was an object
system similar in concept to Microsoft's DCOM, and since the
lack of this on Linux was obviously holding back Linux, creating it
would entice all the EDA vendors and Adobe to port their wares to
Gnome, and Gnome/Linux would take over the desktop.
in concept to Microsoft's offering (C# and its runtime) that it should
attract developers, and Gnome/Linux would take over the desktop.
using XFCE because it was simple and didn't get between me and my
applications. By this time the browser had finally become the platform
it promised to be 10 years earlier, so object models and garbage-collected
system languages didn't matter so much anymore.
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Knowing that you don't need to cater to "consumers" could really open up all kinds of interesting environments.
This idea must be part of some zeitgeist since I've been thinking the same thing ever since I'd heard about creatives being dissatisfied with the new Apple. This could be a genuine niche if someone with both vision and charisma were to emerge.
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>> creators"
> The whole article written by Eitan was the best thing I've read about
> Gnome lately.
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Crack
Reflecting
Give GNOME 3 time
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> were "popular" with the 1.x userbase when they were originally
> introduced? I don't remember it that way.
2) The file dialog no longer allowed keyboard editing the path;
3) The printing dialog lost some advanced options (the "<a href="https://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/m...">interface nazis</a>" thread).
> that different to what we are seeing this time around.
> Moreover, throwing money at the usability issue to purchase additional
> expert manpower will not solve the perception problem. Changes are
> disruptive...even changes that adhere to expert state-of-the-art
> usability design considerations. Because fundamentally the userbase
> really does not appreciate what is and is not good usability in the
> same way that those trained in the art and science of usability do.
> users do. And its far from clear to me that we as a userbase appreciate
> or even understand the value of usability experts.
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> averse, but one should also consider the possibility that Gnome Shell
> may be a good fit only for a subset of desktop users.
> could call themselves an expert in the field. Why can't I call myself an > expert too? Do usability experts always agree when they make design
> decisions?
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> to shoot for. We are not the mainstream, our preferences will
> never be the mainstream, we are a very poor design target.
> about the perception of usability design. As an audience I do no think
> we appreciate what trained designers actually bring to the table.
> You clearly do not. Anyone who stands up and basically says ah that
> stuff is easy, anyone can be an expert at that, clearly has no idea.
> I really feel for the people who have actually been trained in design
> in our community for that reason. Constantly having to fight with
> people with no training who think they can do it better.
> Demoralizing really.
> explain some core concepts to us, so we, the larger participatory
> community, can better appreciate the effort being made (even if we
> still don't like the final outcome).
> profession. But in order for this to happen we are going to have
> to make a safe space for these people to start communicating out
> in the open without having to deal with you and the rest of the
> "I'm not an expert but I can do better than that" crowd.
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We have heard the argument that KDE 4.0 was not ready for production before; I remain unconvinced.
Following conventions
Following conventions
KDE 4.0 is not KDE4 but only the first (4.0.0 even non-bugfix) release in a years-long KDE 4 series to come.
KDE 4.0 is known to have missing parts or temporary implementations (eg. printing, PIM, Plasma).
Most changes happened under the surface and cannot be discovered in a "30 minutes usage" review anyway.
User interfaces being unchanged in 4.0 compared to 3.5 may be still > changed/improved during KDE 4 life time.
KDE 4.0 will not be the fastest KDE 4 release - like for KDE 2 most speed optimizations will happen later during KDE 4.
Most applications (many are not even fully ported yet) will take only advantage of new features which the new Qt/KDE libraries offer later.
Don't measure portability success (eg. MS Windows) by current availability of application releases, they will come.
KDE 4.0 is only expected to be used by early adopters, not every KDE 3.5 user (and IMHO KDE 4.0 shouldn't be pushed onto other user types like planned for Kubuntu ShipIt (which by the way is said to have only 6 months support for its packages)).
KDE 4.1 development will not require the same amount of time as the big technology jump of KDE 4.0: expect KDE 4.1 later this year.
Last, again: KDE 4.0 is not KDE 4.
Following conventions
Following conventions
Following conventions
Following conventions
Following conventions
Following conventions
That was about all distros, since all of them included KDE 4.0 as stable. So distros did not pay enough attention, just saw the release, took the thing and packaged it. As is their job.
Following conventions
That was about all distros, since all of them included KDE 4.0 as stableFollowing conventions
This is a bit exaggerated. For instance Mandriva, which is/was primarily a KDE-based distro, carried KDE3 as the default configuration and offered KDE 4.0 only as an experimental option with suitable warnings in the 2008.1 installation instructions.
They didn't switch to KDE4 as a default until the 2009.0 release containing KDE 4.1.1. Even then it came with warnings and an installation option to stick with KDE3 instead.
So not everyone, thanks. Just curious, what did OpenSuse do? They are the flagship KDE distro and sponsor KDE development. Did they ship 4.0 as stable, or did they wait until 4.1?
Following conventions
I'm not a OpenSUSE user, but Wikipedia states that 11.0 and 11.1 shipped both KDE3 and KDE4. OpenSUSE 11.2 (late 2009) was the first to offer KDE4 only, and by that point it was KDE 4.2.something.
Following conventions
Following conventions
Following conventions
Following conventions
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The Gnome Foundation could spend some money to run a serious usability study on Gnome Shell, similar to the one that Sun did at the time of Gnome 1 which led to many of the UI changes we saw in 2.x.
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> result of a change, they should not be engaging in it.
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> rather easily. The Cinnamon effort proves this quite neatly
> (unfortunately, it also creates even more desktop fragmentation).
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OT: Accessibility problem with GNOME 3.x
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- PDF editor (no, okular does not edit PDFs, it just pretends to do that). I used this PDF X-Change (proprietary) under Wine, but it crashes somewhat often.
- (Own a fancy video camera) a decent video editor (yes, there are video editors for Linux... no, I am not happy with them).
- (Own a fancy photo camera) a good RAW editor (yes, I know dcraw and the others, IMHO they are not as good as Lightroom or the RAW editor that came with my camera which I failed to run using Wine)
- a photo manager that allows me to easily create a high quality album for printing.
Give GNOME 3 time
Give GNOME 3 time
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> specific choice made in the early 1980s by someone at Apple
Give GNOME 3 time
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If you don't want to get labelled as hate, you should take out the phrases that ascribe motivations to others. For example:
the developers are presumably obsessed about a
specific choice made in the early 1980s by someone at Apple
Sounds pretty unlikely to be true.collaborated properly (as promised)
Sounds like you're saying you know exactly what the issues are here better than the developers and are implying that "the developers" (not a monolith; this is open source) broke a promise to you (I doubt there was some sort of promise to implement webdav to your satisfaction).simple scripts that wrap stuff like wget
This makes it clear to developers that you have no idea what's involved.menu-stealing masquerading as innovation
You're implying that the developers are trying to impress you with BS "innovation" claims, rather than making what they think is the best decision.In short you do not know what the issues are here, but you're telling other people they are incompetent jerks with evil motivations. That's why you get labelled as hate.
It would suffice to say "I wish webdav worked in Nautilus and interoperated with KDE, here's what I try to do that doesn't work" (if it isn't there already, saying it in a bug tracker would be ideal).
Give GNOME 3 time
Give GNOME 3 time
You came up with wording that made it sounds like entitlement, which Havoc simply pointed out.
Being that someone I'd like to emphasis that this was intended to be a short-term stop gap solution because its behavior cannot be guaranteed to be stable (due to delegating to many different tools) nor does it provide most of the features application developer using launcher APIs grew accustomed to.
I find it pretty ironic that "failure of collaboration" comes up in a reply to a posting by Havoc, a person who has put unparalleled efforts into *the* collaboration enabler: D-Bus
Give GNOME 3 time
The people involved were aware of the decoupling provided by a service based approach, oherwise D-Bus would have never received the buy-in it has today.
It even comes with a simplified interface named kde-open which is specifically intended for use cases like xdg-open, while kfmclient had such capabilities just incidentally, its purpose being a console interface to KDE file manager program.
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Perhaps xsettings-spec should grow a new, `Net/SingleClickOpens` setting. Then all programs would be able to find that setting in a single, consistent place.
Give GNOME 3 time
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or, you know, open the preferences dialog in nautilus itself.
sadly, single-click operations are not yet well designed - there's still lots to do in that area, and the design team and nautilus maintainer are well aware of that.
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Quite right, for example somebody might decide that the routine which draws the desktop background a certain color would be the "mechanism", whilst the choice of color to draw would be the "policy".
divided, which is why the problem of "how to decide what color to set the desktop background" is that age-old computer science puzzle yet to be solved by *any* desktop for over 200 years!
</cheeky banter>
Yes, good god, imagine the gigabtyes of code required to code window that asks "what fontsize do you want?", and then the terabytes of diskspace required to store 255,255,6 in a file somewhere, think of the inodes, please won't someone think of the inodes!!!
<less cheek>
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Give GNOME 3 time
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|> in ~16 years of Linux.
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I have to disagree in the case of Gnome usability experts. Strongly. Based on the above objective complaints.
Gnome 3 does away with this, but it leaves user an option to still minimise windows (in a surprising about face when compared to the rest of the system, through a configurable option).
And nobody seems to be listening.
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- applied wrong UI concepts to essentially a desktop OS
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A -> B -> C
B: GNOME 3 doesn't really do that
C: GNOME 3 is no good (for you)
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- nautilus, no easy filtering of folders, so I run dolphin as my file browser (it is one of the 'stars' of kde imho, very sad to see it is no longer maintained) - it is great to be able to do ctrl-i p d and have a list of pdfs for example.
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moving away from the power user work flow of many of the Linux (the whole system, but just the kernel) developers use.
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> is the way to go for true mainstream users...
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The issue is that the pixels changed.
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https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/2001-Jan...
But, someone else would have told you to use it at that time.
It just depended on who you asked. There wasn't a dictator to decide.
For example, a list of "official" API: http://developer.gnome.org/platform-overview/stable/
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And why would we? We convinced ourselves that we are the spokesperson for the silent majority, so we know what they want. And without data, we can never be wrong. Because even if all the people on the Internet complain to us in unison (ie your first group), we know we're still speaking for the huge majority. How could we be wrong?
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Innovation is fine, as long as it is optional. If you cannot turn it off, in effect you are forcing innovation down people's throats; they feel like guinea pigs and get angry.
The place of innovation
The place of innovation
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But now the thread reads something like:
flamewar..
interesting..
flamewar..
flamewar..
An Opportunity is coming...
An Opportunity is coming...
An Opportunity is coming...
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Some fascinating tidbits in that Ottawa Linux Symposium LWN article that Jon linked to:
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Amazing how time flies....
CO may be purchased by Caldera, reports this ZDNet article. This is reminiscent of some predictions that one of the post-IPO Linux companies would pick up SGI. SCO has been around for almost twenty years and has a long track record. Now it might be purchased by a veritable "upstart". Nonetheless, this looks like a potential good match. SCO's emphasis on reseller channels matches Caldera's long-term philosophy and their support services would put Caldera on a much better footing in competition with Red Hat, particularly in the international markets.
Meanwhile, the rumored price, $70 million in stock, seems incredibly small given the prices for small Linux startups only a few months ago.
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Only now are distros starting to package it.
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> was make it so GNOME 2 and 3 could not be
> installed side-by-side.
> coming back and things would get better.
The flames are one data point among many, just as they always are with every piece of software. Developers and designers have to go chase down the broader, more thorough data they need, and apply copious amounts of their own judgment.
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