Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users

There have been plenty of decent criticism of GNOME 3.

Along the long the lines of, "Things that I used to be able to do in a click now take several", "I can't change my font size", etc.

But all that gets swept away as "Haters gonna hate".

We used to try to make user interfaces "discoverable" and the essentials of their use self-evidently obvious. Now, it appears to all be about "user experience", and actually making the software usable for all, for actually doing things, appears to have taken a back seat to superficial appearance above all else. GNOME is not alone in this respect, but it's the worst offender. Unity and Windows 8 are also bad in this respect. Outright hiding functionality unless you know the secret on-screen location or magic keypress to activate it is not discoverable or helpful, even if it looks "pretty" or "reduces clutter". (Unity hiding application menus is another massive failure.) If you need a 10 minute introduction to explain how to use it at the most basic level, like how to start an application (or even find out what/where they are) and how to switch off your computer, then it's quite clearly fundamentally broken.

And it's not like the problems are just skin deep. There's a lot more to a desktop environment than the surface appearance alone. It needs quality, well-maintained libraries underneath that. And the GNOME libraries are a poorly-maintained, buggy pile, which were always changing too fast for comfort, but at least didn't used to have core functionality ripped out on a whim. Any developer who values their time and the quality of their code would avoid them.

"Well it depends. Criticism of the form "make everything look as I'm used to" is not very interesting."

It may be not very interesting, but that's a valid criticism nonetheless: 'This worked for me and you changed it in such a way that it doesn't work as well anymore, why is that?' So far no answer to this question.

"The people behind Gnome 3 decided to innovate, adopt a new interface and go on. That's a difficult decision for an established desktop but nevertheless they did. Irrespective of whether I like the new desktop or not, it is nice for free software to innovate and include new designs."

The problem is, the end result of their attempt to innovate has proved to be less effective than what already existed for quite a number of users. Worse, so far we still don't know how what we had was broken and why it needed to be fixed. Seems that we should learn to love the "brand", yay! :)

"Btw. I think most of the gnome 3 criticism comes from the fact that the new interface requires some introduction (10min one) on how to use. Maybe they should ask the age of the should have included a video played on the first installation. I'm really old-school person but liked the interface only by the time I watched a video in youtube on how to use it."

That's actually a good point, but you shouldn't assume that most if not all of the criticism comes from people who tried GNOME 3 for less than 10 minutes: I was an enthusiast, I followed discussions about Gnome 3, and I tried to like it. The fact that they failed to impress people who were loyal users and supporters should speak volumes to anybody.

Rehdon

Traditionally innovation goes like this: Make something new, convince people of its merits, gain converts.

GNOME did this: Make something new, confiscate the old, ignore people who ask for their things back.

I'd probably hate Linux, too, if in 1997 someone had wiped my hard disk and installed it without consulting me and then hid the install discs for my previous OS. You can't *make* people want to change just by changing things.

Want to stay relevant for a long time? Don't make a DE, make a platform. Build the base tools other developers use to make awesome things for users... and then *maintain API and ABI compatibility for as long as possible*. Note that I didn't say "Until you want to do something new and the old cruft gets in the way." Add whatever you like, but maintain it forever. UX fads will come and go; which fad to follow should be the user's choice.

Most of the gnome3 criticism comes of from the fact that it's an unusable mess. It's the most hated environment compared to KDE and Unity and this is the fact. 10min is the time that average user comes to the conclusion: wtf is this?! Gnome people have no clue about usability or their just messing everything up intentionally. There's no even way to configure fonts, so it's not a sane DE.

How about "don't trash what was there before". Something like MATE shouldn't be necessary because anyone interested in the legacy interface could just continue to use it. Would it really have been that hard to create GNOME 3 in a way that didn't actively sabotage what was already there?

This kind of "Microsoft" approach is what really riles people.

Upgrading to the latest version of shiny distro should not trash an already functional setup.