The GNOME project at 15 [LWN.net]

The Desktop

Posted Aug 14, 2012 22:30 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

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.

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.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 15, 2012 13:29 UTC (Wed) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link]

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.

[citation needed]

nice hyperbole, but I beg to differ.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 15, 2012 22:29 UTC (Wed) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

Citations asked for obvious statements of opinion. Am I to assume you are being snarky or counter-trolling?

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like good snark, but this is kind of below that bar.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 15, 2012 1:49 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (subscriber, #75) [Link]

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.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 15, 2012 2:45 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

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.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 15, 2012 8:06 UTC (Wed) by BeS (subscriber, #43108) [Link]

>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.

The Desktop

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.

Ummm... yes? :) OK, maybe not 20 years, but my desktop certainly hasn't changed much in 15 years or so.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 15, 2012 10:40 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Interestingly, the green and red buttons often show an old-style phone being on or off hook. Direct reference to the old electro-mechanical phones.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 15, 2012 10:43 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

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.

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.

My point is that most people think the "old" interface (ie, something Windows-XP-like or XFCE-like) is perfectly adequate for desktop PCs.

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).

The Desktop

Posted Aug 15, 2012 13:15 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

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.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 16, 2012 6:10 UTC (Thu) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]

I have over 100 phone numbers in my contact list. Sure, if I could remember all the numbers I need to call then I'll never use the Contact Book. But for many people however, selecting a name from a list has become the primary interface for "dialling" and has been since mobile phones offered such functionality.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 15, 2012 16:04 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (subscriber, #75) [Link]

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.

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.

The Desktop

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.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 15, 2012 23:01 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

> The way we use our desktops today is actually very different from the way we used them 10 or 20 years ago

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.
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.

> 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.
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.

> 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.
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't helping, especially since there is not yet an agreement on what (if any) problems exist.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 16, 2012 6:16 UTC (Thu) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]

When some engages in what is clearly opinion or conjecture, spouting "Citation Needed" (as if any relevant citation could ever be provided for such statements anyway) is churlish and unnecessary

The Desktop

Posted Aug 16, 2012 15:57 UTC (Thu) by arafel (subscriber, #18557) [Link]

> 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

I would respectfully suggest that your experience and approach is way, way outside the mainstream.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 17, 2012 14:46 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

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.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 22, 2012 7:43 UTC (Wed) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]

There are quite a few people using windows today that after receiving a new system reset the look and feel to "classic mode" which is essentially the interface of Windows 2000 which is close to 15 years old. There are lot of people that don't like change for the sake of change.

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.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 18, 2012 10:05 UTC (Sat) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link]

> The way we use our desktops today is actually very different from the way we used them 10 or 20 years ago

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.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 21, 2012 13:42 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

In fact, all those interface changes have been as minimal as possible given the technological constraints and consumers have consistently rewarded manufacturers that simulated old controls with new tech whenever possible. Even radical changes like taking pictures from a screen and not a viewfinder have been smoothed over by providing both for years to give users time to adapt.

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.

Pure wisdom

Posted Aug 21, 2012 17:21 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

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.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 15, 2012 13:45 UTC (Wed) by juliank (subscriber, #45896) [Link]

At least XFCE 4.8 is hardly usable for the average user I think:

* The user switching applet only shows user names, which they don't know (seems fixed in 4.10, though)
* 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.

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.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 15, 2012 18:28 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

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.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 15, 2012 23:12 UTC (Wed) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [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. They worked differently enough from Windows in details that it was confusing; a setup that looked different gave people the right idea that they should be learning something new and made it easier to complete the tasks in the study.

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.

The Desktop

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.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 16, 2012 6:56 UTC (Thu) by jmspeex (subscriber, #51639) [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.

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

Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:54 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

I think it was some kind of "office workers" new to Linux, but I really don't remember much at all other than that one observation about Windows-like setups being confusing.

The Desktop

Posted Aug 16, 2012 7:19 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

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.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 5:36 UTC (Wed) by aryonoco (subscriber, #55563) [Link]

Thank you, thank you thank you.

I especially liked the part about those who yell the loudest do not necessarily represent the majority.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 19:57 UTC (Wed) by codewiz (subscriber, #63050) [Link]

> I especially liked the part about those who yell the loudest do not necessarily represent the majority.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 20:34 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Are you sure that the design changes between the 1.x to 2.x were "popular" with the 1.x userbase when they were originally introduced? I don't remember it that way. And the parent article here gives a little snarky head nod to the fact that we went through a lot of this emotion before in the 1.x to 2.x transition. It is really worth going back and taking a detailed look at the 1.x to 2.x transition...really look at the initial reaction to the changes being planned and implemented which fell out of the usability study you hold up as a good idea. I bet the reaction really was not all that great and not all 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.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 21:30 UTC (Wed) by rleigh (subscriber, #14622) [Link]

Regarding the 1.x to 2.x transition, there certainly was a fair amount of criticism at the removal of a some options and functionality. But I think it's also fair to say that it was also fairly eagerly anticipated. GNOME 1.x had its fair share of UI inconsistency, segfaulting buggy applications, and options craziness, so there was also something to be gained by the UI simplification and application reworking. There were also a number of key improvements in GTK+: font rendering with freetype/fontconfig/pango replacing XLFDs, MVC widgets like the GtkTreeView. In other words, there was a lot of important, visible, technical improvement which greatly benefited both the user and the developer, and which led to improvements in all GNOME applications. As a developer, I couldn't wait to start using GTK+2.0. And while the desktop was a bit blander, it was still mostly usable, and more importantly, stable.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 21:40 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

GNOME 3.0 was initially about removing all the deprecated things and focusing on all the new technologies that were made and used to replace them.

That you didn't notice these things is actually quite a compliment!

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 22:11 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> Moreover, throwing money at the usability issue to purchase additional expert manpower will not solve the perception problem.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 22:54 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Fine be skeptical... im all for skeptical. And I'm all for published data , archived stakeholder discussion, and overall process transparency as can be achieved in any development process. I believe those things have value and help to build an informed citizenry not just in political governance but in all participatory communities. And there is always room for improvement in process transparency.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 18, 2012 10:38 UTC (Sat) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link]

> 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.

The opposite of "optimal" is "worst". So you okay with GNOME alienating all lwn-readers in the most effective way?

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 5:13 UTC (Thu) by codewiz (subscriber, #63050) [Link]

> Are you sure that the design changes between the 1.x to 2.x
> were "popular" with the 1.x userbase when they were originally
> introduced? I don't remember it that way.

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;
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).

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
> 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.

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
> users do. And its far from clear to me that we as a userbase appreciate
> or even understand the value of usability experts.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:41 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

> 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.

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
> averse, but one should also consider the possibility that Gnome Shell
> may be a good fit only for a subset of desktop users.

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
> 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?

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 17:57 UTC (Thu) by codewiz (subscriber, #63050) [Link]

> 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.

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
> 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.

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
> 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).

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
> 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.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 18, 2012 10:52 UTC (Sat) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link]

> [...] take KDE 4's fall: the initial release was such a gigantic fiasco [...]

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.

Following conventions

Posted Aug 18, 2012 12:55 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

We have heard the argument that KDE 4.0 was not ready for production before; I remain unconvinced.

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.

Following conventions

Posted Aug 18, 2012 13:59 UTC (Sat) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link]

That KDE 4.0 wasn't considered production ready was communicated widely at that time.

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:
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

Posted Aug 18, 2012 16:50 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Widely communicated but not mentioned in the 4.0 announcement? Not even distribution maintainers got the message clearly. KDE people admitted their mistake and corrected the 4.1 announcement but it was a bit too late. That's alright though. We all make mistakes. Let's not go around engaging in revisionist history. That's just silly.

Following conventions

Posted Aug 19, 2012 11:59 UTC (Sun) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link]

I expect a Distribution maintainer to not only read one announcement. If the beta status was to a mere user like me totally clear, it is implausible a maintainer hadn't heard about it. This has nothing to do with revision of history but with minimal awareness about KDE at the end of 2007.

Following conventions

Posted Aug 19, 2012 16:00 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

KDE 4.0 announcement wasn't just for distribution maintainers but also for users so that excuse is weak especially consider 4.1 announcement did include such a note. You can either claim that distribution maintainers who KDE itself advertised as including 4.0 were incompetent or admit there were mistakes from the project.

Following conventions

Posted Aug 19, 2012 21:50 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Uh, the 4.1 announcement included such a note *because* of the flap over the 4.0 announcement not including one. (I would have hoped that it was bleeding obvious that 4.1 was released after the reaction to 4.0 had been observed, but apparently not...)

Following conventions

Posted Aug 20, 2012 6:21 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

It is obvious but you miss my point. 4.1 did include such a note because KDE project realized that not making it obvious in 4.0 was a mistake from the strong reaction to it. Now nobody should be trying to blame it all on distributions.

Following conventions

Posted Aug 20, 2012 22:47 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Any distro that thought 4.0 was stable and included it as such was a distro that had not been paying any attention to the prereleases (with subtle hints such as the codename 'Krash') nor even tried to run the thing for a while and seen just how far from perfect it was -- nor even hung out on the kde development lists and observed the same.

Following conventions

Posted Aug 20, 2012 22:56 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

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.

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.

Following conventions

Posted Aug 20, 2012 23:22 UTC (Mon) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]

That was about all distros, since all of them included KDE 4.0 as stable
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.

Following conventions

Posted Aug 20, 2012 23:26 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

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

Posted Aug 20, 2012 23:47 UTC (Mon) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]

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

Posted Aug 21, 2012 7:14 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Yeah... And that's also why KDE released two more 3.5 versions after 4.0 was released. Maybe it should have been more, and if distributions had asked for another 3.5 release, I'm fairly sure one more would have been released, since for some time bug fixes were going in.

Following conventions

Posted Sep 1, 2012 15:09 UTC (Sat) by rich0 (guest, #55509) [Link]

Not only that, but was 3.5 still maintained?

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.

Following conventions

Posted Sep 1, 2012 15:31 UTC (Sat) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

KDE 3.5 was never abandoned. But it's true that most app devs got lured into the upgrade lure. 3.5.10 was relased in august 2008, when 4.1 was already out, and 3.5.13 was release as Trinity last year.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 18, 2012 23:58 UTC (Sat) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link]

Me too. It clearly said beta. Unfortunately, people say "4.0" and said "oh, stable". So I think the lesson there was to say "beta" and call it 3.99.9 or something like that.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Sep 1, 2012 15:13 UTC (Sat) by rich0 (guest, #55509) [Link]

That, and keep releasing new versions that are lower-numbered.

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).

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 21:38 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

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.

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).

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 22:23 UTC (Wed) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

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:

I am a busy person with stuff to do.
I've learned a lot of half-unconscious habits that I use often to do my stuff.
I upgraded and some of my habits don't work anymore.
This is super annoying and I don't have time for it.
Who are these jerks hosing me? Just change it back.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 1:24 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> 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.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 2:12 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

> If developers cannot come up with a genuine functional improvement as a
> result of a change, they should not be engaging in it.

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."

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 2:16 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 23:47 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

As I said in some other posts, I think Gnome 3 can actually be fixed rather easily. The Cinnamon effort proves this quite neatly (unfortunately, it also creates even more desktop fragmentation).

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 17, 2012 12:40 UTC (Fri) by codewiz (subscriber, #63050) [Link]

> As I said in some other posts, I think Gnome 3 can actually be fixed
> rather easily. The Cinnamon effort proves this quite neatly
> (unfortunately, it also creates even more desktop fragmentation).

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).

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 6:26 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> 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 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".

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 8:21 UTC (Wed) by AngryChris (subscriber, #74783) [Link]

While I think GNOME Shell is slick and all, the deal breaker for me was that it does not work, at all, under xrdp or NX Desktop. I've found that KDE works flawlessly and is more comfortable to use.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 10:31 UTC (Wed) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

After the GNOME 1 to 2 transition, GNOME was too huge and too slow for my machine, so I switched to XFCE (3?). After a while, GNOME developers did an amazing work and improved performance, memory usage and stability, so I switched back to GNOME. Now GNOME 3 drove me nuts (mainly the depressing dark colours I can't change and the inconsistent look of different dialogues, some dark, some bright), so I switched to XFCE, again. I'm sure, the GNOME developers will fix the issues.

Happy birthday, GNOME! We'll meet again.

(don't know where, don't know when, sorry Vera Lynn)

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 13:53 UTC (Wed) by juliank (subscriber, #45896) [Link]

Apps for visual consumption are dark, the others normal.

OT: Accessibility problem with GNOME 3.x

Posted Aug 15, 2012 14:50 UTC (Wed) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

And so are a lot of dialogues, e.g. of network manager applet, IIRC. GNOME 2 had a really nice and consistent default look and I had never the wish to change it. GNOME 3 is hard to read for my old eyes (too dark) and I could not change the look to sth. readable and consistent. But I'm sure, Debian Jessie will have a nice GNOME 3 (at the ago of 17 or 18 by then) for me, again :~)

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 11:35 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

> 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.

Yes they do. Even more often. But they sell it as improvement with a wonderful marketing machine.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 12:06 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

That is interesting. Gnome gets released every 6 months, which is when breakage occurs (sometimes). So, you are saying that Apple break this even more often than that. I don't really use this stuff, but I do not remember my daughter dowloading a new OS X that often...

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 12:15 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

I have had an MacBook for the last 3 years, and it's a good machine and a nicely thought OS, but it's really inflexible and it breaks stuff gratuitously. I bought it in August 2009, with Leopard installed, but I got a disk with Snow Leopard with it in September. Lion came two years later, and it broke the dashboard (which I used and liked) and inverted the mouse wheel (I actually liked that so much that I use "natural scrolling" in my KDE machines), and in little more than a year came Mountain Lion and signed executables and other "goodnesses"...

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 15:49 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

So in 3 years they broke and re-fixed the dashboard, and added optional signed executables? That sounds like hardly any breakage at all...? Honestly curious, I'm very new to this Mac thing.

(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?)

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:56 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

I think people are justifiably worried that signed executables will be enforced in a future version of OS X.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:55 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

While we're on the topic, does anyone remember how awesome Exposé was? Shame that was taken away in OS X 10.7 (Lion). :(

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 17:03 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Aw... And that just when I got used to it in KDE...

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 17:43 UTC (Thu) by gpoo (subscriber, #56055) [Link]

I do not think you can count many breakages (if any) between GNOME 2.8 and GNOME 2.32. And those were 12 releases in 6 years.

You can expect some "breakages" in the early stages of a major release, while the UI is being adjusted.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 14:25 UTC (Thu) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]

> 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.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 15:02 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

It's because applications can't get critical mass. The desktop itself has a fairly small number of developers, but "everyone" using Linux is interested in it and the Linux distributions sponsor it a little bit (not a lot).

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)

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 18:49 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

> 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.

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...

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 20:17 UTC (Thu) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]

> Just curious, what apps are we talking about?

Out of the top of my head:
- 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.

On a practical note, my wife uses OSX. Using the same OS would simplify some of my `family sys-admin duties`.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 15, 2012 11:33 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

I've recently had reason to evaluate the current desktop options on Ubuntu, and it makes me feel that the golden age of the Linux desktop is already behind us. I'm tempted to write a long rant about it, although this would involve spending time on something likely to be labelled as "hate" instead of being interpreted as a collection of suggestions for doing things better. So here's just one item...

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.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 15, 2012 11:58 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

> 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.

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.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 15, 2012 12:13 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

That's another problem: you have to spend hours playing with the configuration to restore the sane settings of previous releases.

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.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 15, 2012 12:20 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Or you press shift-click, or you go to settings/Configure dolphin, select "Navigation" and then select "Double-click to open files/folders". Then single-click selects the item. I noticed you need to restart dolphin for that option to "take" -- so I guess that's a bug. The option itself has been around since KDE 2, at least.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 15, 2012 12:51 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

I was referring to the ability to just single-click on icons to open each resource, with clicking on metadata or dragging over icons to select them. Maybe that wasn't the default in KDE 1 or 2 or whenever I started to use it, but the time for RSI-inducing double-clicking should have ended a long time ago.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 15, 2012 23:25 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

Aha! So you DO exist! I knew there must have been *someone* out there that liked the KDE default focus-select click-open behavior... it's the first thing that I turn off.

Nice to finally meet you.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 16, 2012 8:07 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

I'm not sure what you mean by "focus-select", since I mentioned that I still click to select, but click-to-open has been around since kfm and KDE 1 if I remember correctly. And I can't believe that a substantial proportion of users switch this off. But at least you can do so: that was part of my point about the double-click insistence in some environments.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 16, 2012 18:45 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

Ow, I love it too. Esp on my laptops - with a touch pad, double clicking sucks.

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.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 16, 2012 20:00 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

There's another thing I discovered with touchpads: the tap-to-click, which I turned off wherever I could in order to avoid confusion about sudden, unanticipated click events. Once again, this had to be done in every desktop environment I evaluated in a range of different dialogues. Fortunately, the GNOME developers hadn't decided that tap-to-click was purely beneficial and not to be removed from the user experience, so for this I give them credit.

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.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 18, 2012 11:09 UTC (Sat) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link]

"One click to activate action" is also known as "consistent behavior". How many times do you click on a link in an browser-window or a menu-item?

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Sep 1, 2012 16:45 UTC (Sat) by rich0 (guest, #55509) [Link]

How often do you select a menu item or hyperlink without actually opening it?

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...

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 15, 2012 15:25 UTC (Wed) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

> likely to be labelled as "hate"

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

Posted Aug 15, 2012 19:44 UTC (Wed) by dbnichol (subscriber, #39622) [Link]

That was really refreshing to read. You're awesome, Havoc.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 15, 2012 22:15 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

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.

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.

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).

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.

simple scripts that wrap stuff like wget
This makes it clear to developers that you have no idea what's involved.

Let that be your opinion, then. I see that you cut the bit about such things being a quick hack.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 16, 2012 15:43 UTC (Thu) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]

"Thanks for using the "entitlement" argument."

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

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:53 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

You came up with wording that made it sounds like entitlement, which Havoc simply pointed out.

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 16, 2012 18:49 UTC (Thu) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]

"...because people apparently don't want to write some service-level code without sucking in libraries that other people don't want to use."

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.
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.

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).
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.

"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.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Sep 1, 2012 16:48 UTC (Sat) by rich0 (guest, #55509) [Link]

Who uses double-clicking to do the "common thing"?

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.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 15, 2012 17:03 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

The Golden Age of X is always behind us.. otherwise we wouldn't nostagically remember it. For my oldest collegues, the golden age of desktops was before any of these "desktops" came out.. just twm, xaw and do your thing. For others it was the time of the many window managers (e, sawfish, fvwm, etc etc.) Others it is the GNOME 2.0 KDE 3 days. And in 10 years it will be when we had the competition between the full deals: Android, KDE4, GNOME3..

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.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 15, 2012 18:18 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I just use Nautilus for Webdav.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:44 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

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

Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:54 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

Oh, and you can run `gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences click-policy single` (or browse to the right setting in dconf-editor) to get the behaviour you want (which is I assume that of items opening upon a single click).

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 16, 2012 18:50 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

Thank you for the advice! I will endeavour to remember and implement this suggestion when I next get the chance and if Nautilus re-enters the picture as a more satisfactory file explorer than Dolphin.

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.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 18, 2012 23:38 UTC (Sat) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link]

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.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 18, 2012 22:29 UTC (Sat) by akeane (subscriber, #85436) [Link]

>replicating a thirty-year-old user interface limitation in an unreliable fashion

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:

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.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 18, 2012 22:48 UTC (Sat) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

> Sorry GNOME people

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.

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 18, 2012 23:46 UTC (Sat) by akeane (subscriber, #85436) [Link]

>The problem is that "policy" and "mechanism" are relative

<cheeky banter>
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".

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
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>

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>
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>

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 ;-)

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 19, 2012 11:35 UTC (Sun) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link]

> at least we can all agree that GNOME 3 is the emacs of desktops (ducks for cover ;-)

*throwing a brick*

Emacs I can configure to what *I* want, so there is no similarity. Vi on the other hand ... ;-)

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 19, 2012 0:17 UTC (Sun) by akeane (subscriber, #85436) [Link]

Sorry for another reply hp, but couldn't resist...

>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 ;-)

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 19, 2012 0:18 UTC (Sun) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link]

Can't wait to see your reaction after wayland replaces X. :-)

Give GNOME 3 time

Posted Aug 19, 2012 0:53 UTC (Sun) by akeane (subscriber, #85436) [Link]

>Can't wait to see your reaction after wayland replaces X. :-)

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 ;-)

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 18:16 UTC (Wed) by kov (subscriber, #7423) [Link]

This should be promoted to article.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 18:22 UTC (Wed) by cunagcleas (subscriber, #29132) [Link]

|> For me, Fedora 17 with GNOME 3 is the best Linux desktop I've used
|> in ~16 years of Linux.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 19:33 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (subscriber, #75) [Link]

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 23:49 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> auto workspaces

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 7:37 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

I have to disagree in the case of Gnome usability experts. Strongly. Based on the above objective complaints.

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).

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).

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.

And nobody seems to be listening.

I've responded to you many many times.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 21:21 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Yeah, bojan's told you his opinion, over and over again. And you've responded with contempt and claims that he is wrong, even though opinions of the form 'X does not work for me, here is why' surely *cannot* be 'wrong'.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 18, 2012 11:19 UTC (Sat) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link]

> opinions of the form 'X does not work for me, here is why'

You are sucked into the rhetoric of bkor. 'X does not work for me' isn't an opinion, it is a fact.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 23, 2012 11:43 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

That is not what I meant.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 19, 2012 0:31 UTC (Sun) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link]

I see nothing wrong with what he said. His opinion was in fact subjective.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 23:45 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

I think you missed the point of what I was trying to say. If you reread my post, you will see that I'm trying to show a pattern of Gnome 3, where developers have either:

- broken long standing UI concepts
- applied wrong UI concepts to essentially a desktop OS

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".

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 17, 2012 1:02 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> Gnome 3 decided to break them, for reasons best described a "philosophical".

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 17, 2012 1:34 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> You're not presenting facts, just your opinion.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 23, 2012 11:32 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

If you look at what you state, it seems for instance that you like to minimize windows. You can only do that in a inperfect way and by default that is hidden.

Your personally like to hide windows. But then your personal ideas don't make things a fact.

Or otherwise stated:
A -> B -> C

A: You like minimizing windows
B: GNOME 3 doesn't really do that
C: GNOME 3 is no good (for you)

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 7:00 UTC (Thu) by moabi (subscriber, #77626) [Link]

I'd just like to add that I am another happy Gnome 3 user. 3.0 was a bit rough, but once the memory leaks were fixed and extensions came along in 3.2 it works great. Unobtrusive, lets me launch and switch apps easily.

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:
- 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.

- 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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 21:55 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

Pretty sure that on LWN people think I am the greatest GNOME 3 supporter (and probably am :P). Actually on a daily basis I dislike various things all the time. Change is annoying. I just accept it more quickly because I either know (because I asked) or I expect things to improve.

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!).

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 21:22 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Change is annoying, he says. This from the guy who a year or so back was confidently asserting that everybody loves change and that GNOME 3 was sure to be a huge hit and that everyone really loved it but was just not saying anything.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 23, 2012 10:52 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

I never said that people love change.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 23, 2012 11:35 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Out of curiosity, how was that testing done? Was it systematic HCI testing, like the Sun stuff in 1.x → 2 days?

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 23, 2012 11:47 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Sadly, I can't find back any copies of the Sun "GNOME Usability Report". All links seem to lead back to:

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 23, 2012 8:10 UTC (Thu) by reddit (guest, #86331) [Link]

If it's not fully ready, what the heck is it doing in a branch leading to a stable release?!?

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 23, 2012 10:56 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

Some things need be tried out in practice. You can leave things for an additional 6 months in some branch. No progress will be made.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 5:12 UTC (Thu) by jmspeex (subscriber, #51639) [Link]

(quick background: I started using gnome around version 0.13 or something, switched to KDE3 for a while when gnome2 came out, went back to gnome2, then switched to xfce when gnome3 came out)

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 7:42 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

moving away from the power user work flow of many of the Linux (the whole system, but just the kernel) developers use.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 15:51 UTC (Thu) by jmspeex (subscriber, #51639) [Link]

Maybe I shouldn't say "power user workflow" but "power user workflows". When you spend 8+ hours a day on the same machine, you want it to work exactly right for you. Personally, I've always (since fvwm1 15 hears ago) used 12 virtual desktops with focus-follows-mouse, minimal (or auto-hide) panel, and a bunch of other options that turn "average users" crazy if they attempt to use my machine. Most other developers I know have similarly "crazy" setups, and they're all different from mine. There isn't a single setup that works for everyone, but if you make it customizable enough (gnome1 was, gnome2 sort of got there 2 years after being initially released), you can support a significant fraction of these power users workflows. However, if you target the system at "the majority of computer users", then considering that the majority of users doesn't even run Linux, you end up in a situation where most of the *existing* users don't like it.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:23 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

I don't think this is the right framing, honestly.

I would put three layers in the onion:

Old-time super-die-hard Linux users (for example learned Unix pre-GNOME/KDE)
More casual Linux users who tend to keep the defaults and also use other OS's pretty often
Mainstream (not using Linux now) (this category conflates all kinds of very distinct people)

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. ;-)

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 17:11 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

If you start to subset the "mainstream not using Linux now," you could pick maybe one of the _closest_ groups to existing users: "developers who use OS X instead of Linux."

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 17, 2012 0:01 UTC (Fri) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]

> In general my feeling is that something separate from GNOME
> is the way to go for true mainstream users...

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 17, 2012 1:55 UTC (Fri) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

What I'm thinking of when I say "something like Android" is that if you wanted to get millions of new people to become users (something the original article here talks about), you'd have to do something that was more green field. Few people are really interested in changing their desktop OS - what's the benefit? Nothing sufficient to offset the hassle. But lots of people were interested in trying smartphones and kindles and tablets.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 18, 2012 15:43 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

But aren't those library users exactly the sort of "everyone" that Gnome 3 is targeting? That's what I thought based on previous lwn comments (could certainly be mistaken).

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 18, 2012 16:03 UTC (Sat) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

I wouldn't feel comfortable answering on their behalf, but I think it's the key question for any software project. I'd say this is the place to start when discussing UI decisions.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Sep 1, 2012 17:04 UTC (Sat) by rich0 (guest, #55509) [Link]

It would seem to me that it is mostly targeted to things like netbooks or other small laptops, or tablets. The netbook platform actually makes sense, and from what I've heard people running those love Unity or Gnome 3.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 21:33 UTC (Thu) by jmspeex (subscriber, #51639) [Link]

Well, first I'm not sure how you define "Old-time super-die-hard Linux users" vs "More casual Linux users". Like most other FOSS developers I know or have met at various conferences, I consider myself as neither "Old-time super-die-hard" (I even use an IDE rather than vi/emacs), nor merely a "casual user". I spend more than 8 hours a day on a Linux machine and like to have it configured for my needs. The original gnome/kde releases were great for me because I no longer had to edit config files. Now, I don't know what fraction of Linux users are developers like me, but it seems like there are enough for a project like gnome to pay attention. And even if FOSS developers were only 1% of Linux users, making a majority of them unhappy is still IMO not a good idea.

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?

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 22:10 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

As I said, the categories are oversimplified. My main point is that I think the original article shares a common misconception that the fights here are about "most current Linux users" vs. "hypothetical mainstream users." I think the fights are almost entirely among people who already care about Linux, and are using it. I think GNOME developers make most decisions with an eye to people who care about and use Linux already (especially when judged by actions and not words).

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
The issue is that the pixels changed.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 16, 2012 22:33 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

Also of course, my first post on this article says why I don't think "GNOME should learn from GNOME 2" is right. Unless you think the main goal of GNOME 2 should have been to avoid flames. GNOME 2 became much more popular than many desktops that did _not_ get flamed (as much). Taking a lesson away from GNOME 2 like "we shouldn't change stuff" or "regressions are never good" would be historically wrong, because either of those lessons would have doomed GNOME during 1.x -> 2.x. Knee-jerk "CADT bad" would have doomed GNOME too. Truly targeting mainstream users instead of Linux users would have doomed it too. There are lots of ways GNOME 2 could have gone wrong. But flames were non-fatal.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 17, 2012 0:38 UTC (Fri) by jmspeex (subscriber, #51639) [Link]

It seems like you're assuming that software cannot change without a rewrite. Just look at the Linux kernel and compare what it was at the time of 1.0 vs 3.0. The two versions have nothing in common. Yet, nobody ever started a rewrite of the kernel and the only regressions that occurred were either unintentional (i.e. bugs happen no matter what) or were about hardware stopped using 10 years earlier. It's been an evolution and that's how you keep your users happy. It took years for gnome2 to re-implement many of the features that gnome1 had. Some It's not clear to me whether these features were always meant to be re-implemented or were only re-implemented because of angry users, but the bottom line is that for gnome2, "change" resulted in several years of being stuck with something worse. Not to mention that gnome1 had stopped improving long before gnome2 was out. So far, gnome3 appears to be the same. gnome2 development slowed down long before the gnome3 release and developers are still re-implementing features that were "lost" in the rewrite (again don't know how much is from "it took time" vs "we changed our mind and re-implemented the feature").

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 17, 2012 1:43 UTC (Fri) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

It sounds good, but if it were that simple... There's something hard about it. Nobody is just trying to piss people off.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 17, 2012 5:44 UTC (Fri) by jmspeex (subscriber, #51639) [Link]

I understand that developers aren't *intentionally* pissing people off and it's just a side effect of something else. Also, I understand that making code evolve isn't easy, but rewrites tend to be even worse -- even if it looks simpler because "hey now I can understand all the code". UI or not, I can't think of any project (though there may be a handful) that really benefited from a rewrite. The only viable way I can see is when you have the resources to keep maintaining the old version until the rewrite is not only released, but achieves feature parity with the (still evolving) old version. This is what Microsoft did with NT and I'm sure it wasn't cheap.

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)

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 17, 2012 6:54 UTC (Fri) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

That sort of code and API sanity (avoid giant rewrites, keep the API stable) is far, far better these days than back then.

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:
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.

There's more consensus/process/cultural-norm now than there used to be.
For example, a list of "official" API: http://developer.gnome.org/platform-overview/stable/

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 17, 2012 16:17 UTC (Fri) by Company (guest, #57006) [Link]

So, I've been thinking for a long time now that GNOME's problem is marketing. Most platforms have worse software than GNOME, the engineering is ok. Translations are world-class, but marketing? Oh My Goodness.

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.
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?

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 17, 2012 17:46 UTC (Fri) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

A few thoughts that occur to me reading that in no special order -

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 19, 2012 17:24 UTC (Sun) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link]

One thing a lot of the big projects have like Fedora, Ubuntu and Mozilla have is a community manager who takes on the flames and tries to do rebuttal and put a good face on things. Answer the common questions as patiently as possible. bkor has been doing some of that, I've been doing some of that.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 24, 2012 9:25 UTC (Fri) by vasi (guest, #83946) [Link]

Thanks, Havoc.

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.

The place of innovation

Posted Aug 26, 2012 15:18 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

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.

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.

The place of innovation

Posted Aug 26, 2012 15:29 UTC (Sun) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

I think most experienced devs (including those at GNOME) understand this. It's just that on balance they think some changes are worth it. Every developer will make different judgments on that front.

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.

The GNOME project at 15

Where to from here?

Crack

Reflecting

Give GNOME 3 time