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

> You forgot that Gnome Shell was installable in parallel as a preview until major change of library. You have been informed about disruptive change before but choose to disregard it for the sake of selfiness
And the plans have been on display at your local panning department for the last nine months! But somehow that is not a comfort when you wake up with a headache and some yahoos equipped with large, yellow bulldozers are trying to knock your house down.

If you complain early it's "Don't complain now, it's still in development!"

If you complain at release time it's "This is an early release, please hold judgement."

If you complain late it's "You should have filed a complaint before the decision was made."

The actual process that apparently should have been followed by concerned parties when they found GNOME 3.0 to be a problem is this:

1) Travel back in time 2 years
2) Join the GNOME project
3) Propose an alternative user interface paradigm
4) Write most or all of that alternative
5) Convince most other GNOME maintainers to buy in to your vision
6) Convince most GNOME designers to buy in to your vision
7) Convince everyone that alternative proposals like Shell are not as good
8) Continue to support and defend your idea throughout development

People who are not willing to perform the above steps obviously do not have sufficient interest in the outcome and have no right to a say in the direction of the GNOME project.

For those people who *did do* all of the above (okay, maybe not time travel) it probably seems *really unreasonable* for people who did not to be complaining all the way at the end (or at all).