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

In my experience, "ordinary users" have either poor eyesight or poor literacy, because they read impossibly slow and are unable to process an entire screen full of data. If they have a dialog open and you ask them to click a specific checkbox, they will be unable to find it, taking a minute or two of moving the mouse in random directions while I tell them whether they are hot or cold.

I've never met a user who (a) would need help discovering a new interface, and (b) could read the entire screen, while (c) simultaneously reading my facial cues for hints.

For this reason, I'd expect Gnome 3 to be more discoverable, since it clears away everything except the stuff relevant to what you're trying to do.

This is certainly how I feel about it -- I have used a tiling WM for years, so most all user interfaces feel foreign and confusing to me. But when I use others' computers, I find Gnome 3 to be very "intuitive". It's comparable to Win7 and beats the pants off of XP, OSX or Unity.