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RegressionRegressionPosted Jan 26, 2013 16:56 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)In reply to: Regression by mjg59 Parent article: Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark
Did it still have launcher buttons?
You can make the case that the lack of a gold exhaust pipe on a hypothetical electric car - let's call it the Ford Luxury - is not a regression since its non-electric predecessor - also called the Ford Luxury - needed such a thing, whereas no-one is really going to miss it on the electric model. The argument in such cases is that technology has made something obsolete and thus the need to choose between, say, gold and steel has been eliminated.
The problem is that the view (or excuse) that technology has made something obsolete is brought out far too often. GNOME 2 won't let you do something that GNOME 1 did? It's because it's all better, that's why! When the developers famously closed bugs against GNOME 1 because GNOME 2 was new and different (http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html), they illustrated precisely this phenomenon.
People want the benefit of brand recognition but also the benefit of not having their current product compared to the previous one, even though having the same name on the product is inevitably going to invite such comparisons. If you want to enjoy the former benefit, you have to relinquish the latter.
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Regression Posted Jan 26, 2013 17:10 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Yes, it still had launcher buttons.
Regression Posted Jan 27, 2013 15:44 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Did anyone miss the removed feature? If not, maybe it's not really a regression. If they did ("My launcher buttons look awful now - why did they change this?") then one can discuss whether it's a minor regression or not.
Perhaps launcher buttons couldn't be transparent before and the background setting was a workaround that was made obsolete, just like the absence of an exhaust pipe on a hypothetical car whose predecessor required one. Since the result is almost completely superior, there's little reason to complain about it, but that almost certainly cannot be said for many consequences of these big product upgrades.
Regression Posted Jan 27, 2013 16:27 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
So we've gone from a regression being something that no longer works to something that no longer works and which nobody really misses, maybe. And it's probably only a minor one. Which sounds awfully like they're subjective, and then we're just back to "I don't like these changes". Why not just say that you don't like the changes, rather than pretending that there's been a truly objective analysis?
Regression Posted Jan 27, 2013 17:52 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
No, I conceded that if a feature goes away and nobody notices, you don't have to take a position on it. It's still a regression, but nobody really cares, and you can argue that in the grand scheme of things, no significant feature has fallen off the feature list.
I also noted that if a feature goes away because it is obsolete - to take an ancient example that once applied to some desktop systems, you don't have to allocate memory manually to a process because the system now does that for you - you can ignore the regression because nothing that anyone was doing before that they can no longer do now (say, allocate a process size of N) is anything they still need to be able to do (because the system will give the process N if it asks for it). Since there is no longer any benefit in even being able to do those obsolete things, there's no general functional regression (you can still run that process).
None of this has anything to do with whether I "like the changes". The issue I have is the way that people deny the experiences of the users by playing games with definitions of what the system was and is, as if the users were supposed to care more about the brand gymnastics than the features actually being delivered.
Regression Posted Jan 28, 2013 14:04 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
Yes Matthew. You're a very smart person and you can successfully outmanoeuvre people by playing semantic games without ever having to lower yourself to making meaningful points.
Clearly, everything you say is therefore correct. It must be wonderful to know that you are so much better at everything than anyone else. I hope you enjoy your future career in law, and wish you all the best.
Regression Posted Jan 28, 2013 16:05 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
The meaningful point is that "This UI has regressions and therefore should never have been made the default" is a false claim to a measurable change in quality and an implication that, as a result, the choice was irrational. People should stick to "It breaks my workflow" or "I find this change objectionable for some other reason", which are arguments that can lead to actual discussions about whether the improvements to other people's workflow outweigh that, or whether there would be some way to tweak the behaviour such that a specific usecase becomes practical without compromising any other design decisions. Bringing up "regression" shuts that opportunity off, because we all know that regressions are unarguably bad and need to be fixed immediately. People should say what they mean rather than throw around terms they can't even meaningfully define.
Regression Posted Jan 28, 2013 16:17 UTC (Mon) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]
> People should say what they mean rather than throw around terms they can't even meaningfully define.
With Gnome 2 I was able to control my CPU governors with a graphical applet.
For me it's simply a regression.
Regression Posted Jan 28, 2013 16:40 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
There's no "For me". A regression is a regression. With GNOME 1 I used to be able to set the background to launcher tiles. With GNOME 2 I couldn't. Is this a regression? When defining regression as "Something that used to be possible is no longer possible", yes. Do I care? No. Did anybody? Probably, but it was 10 years ago and they've probably got over it.
Regression Posted Jan 28, 2013 17:02 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]
>With Gnome 2 I was able to control my CPU governors with a graphical applet.
>With Gnone 3 there is no applet and I can't control my CPU governors through the GUI.
Perhaps there isn't an "applet" but there is an extension, available through the extensions.gnome.org website.
Regression Posted Jan 28, 2013 18:52 UTC (Mon) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]
> Perhaps there isn't an "applet" but there is an extension, available through the extensions.gnome.org website.
You're right. The extension is here : https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/444/cpu-freq/
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