Shuttleworth: Not convinced by rolling releases

Well, I just looked again and I can't find how to switch this feature on or off in KDE 3.5, so unless someone can actually point me to the dialogue in question, I'll take my own experiences with my current desktop over people's recollections.

As for whether it's a useful feature, I'm sure people do like it, but I've always been happy with the Ctrl-F<n> shortcuts and don't use the equivalent workspace-cycling shortcuts that are equivalent to the scrollwheel actions.

I also take exception to the "only new users would hate this" insinuation. First of all, new users might like it if it didn't impact them because of the mousepad scrolling region functionality, which is another area that you either love or hate regardless of whether you are new to computers or not. It is almost like pressing the wrong part of the space bar and experiencing the same effect as holding down Alt-Tab.

But I can see the point of it: you might want to navigate by depth which either means navigating the window stack or navigating workspaces, and the mousewheel provides that extra dimension of navigation. What is quite clear, however, is that no-one thought that this potentially useful function would "leak out" and damage usability elsewhere. We get lectured all the time about how the smart usability people know much more than us, but either the people exposed to the feature with a mousepad during testing were comfortable with it already (and probably using a mousepad they were already familiar with) or it didn't get usability tested in that environment at all.

My regret is that we're still having to deal with such annoyances when we could have moved far beyond them instead by now.