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Good grief!Good grief!Posted Mar 31, 2013 20:59 UTC (Sun) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203)In reply to: Good grief! by dowdle Parent article: GNOME, Fedora, and login-screen logos
I have GNOME3 on this laptop. It isn't the default desktop but I have fired it up for a few random 'typical user' types just to see what happened. So far zero have been able to figure it out without assistance.
Staff I could retrain if I saw the value in the effort. But I also want to keep the same user experience for the public computing labs in our libraries because if staff uses the same thing I'm not the only one who can help patrons. Right now they all use CentOS with GNOME as the default. Members of the general public come in and have little problem using the workstations. There is no way I'd dump random members of the general public in front of GNOME3.
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Good grief! Posted Apr 1, 2013 1:40 UTC (Mon) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
Not even in fallback/classic mode?
Good grief! Posted Apr 6, 2013 1:15 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
More anecdata: it took me about 15 seconds to explain GNOME3 to my sister and the only question was "how do I change the background?". Key pieces of information:
- Where the suspend/shutdown menu is
She had used KDE and GNOME2 before and I believe is currently using her main laptop (GNOME3 was on a netbook I replaced) with Windows 7 at school (for various reasons).
Good grief! Posted Apr 6, 2013 14:30 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Had she gotten used to Gnome 2 first? (sounds like no)
If she had, then did she ask why you needed to explain anything at all? Isn't Gnome intended to be discoverable and easy to use for everyone?
Just curious because your experience supporting other peoples' Gnome desktops has been very different from mine. :(
Good grief! Posted Apr 6, 2013 15:31 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
> Had she gotten used to Gnome 2 first? (sounds like no)
She had used it before (see below).
> If she had, then did she ask why you needed to explain anything at all? Isn't Gnome intended to be discoverable and easy to use for everyone?
The top-left corner is definitely *not* discoverable. If there were an intro "Welcome to GNOME" video like Windows has these days, I would have left it at that, but it doesn't. I do think it's easy to use, but discoverability is not it's strong suit (I assume things have changed since 3.2, but I haven't touched it since). To be fair, there were other explanations about the netbook[1] at the same time, so it wasn't like I was explaining *just* GNOME3.
> Just curious because your experience supporting other peoples' Gnome desktops has been very different from mine. :(
Likely. My family has used at least GNOME2, GNOME3, KDE3, KDE4, Android, and Windows XP. I think my sister is the only one other than me to have used Windows other than XP on her new college laptop (Windows 7). I don't think there are any Windows machines left in the house. A history of machines at home:
My family has had experience with Fedora since Fedora 6 or 7 (I forget when the XP install finally decided that the motherboard didn't have Ethernet ports). That machine is still on Fedora 10 today (it's been KDE the entire time, so it's probably 4.2 now). Dad still uses it occasionally to my knowledge. At some point a Windows XP laptop was acquired for free from somewhere. It was used for games and browsing by Mom and my sister.
After I graduated college, I left my laptop at home (replacing the XP laptop) with Fedora 14 or so with a stock GNOME install on it. My sister mainly used it to play KShishen, KPatience, the web browser, and the occasional assignment (OpenOffice.org) rather than the desktop. I think Mom used it for email, Dad didn't really use it. I'd get a call every now and then whenever the printer was acting up or a refresher on how to get files between a flash drive and $HOME.
A year later, I gave a netbook I replaced to my sister for taking to classes at college while her larger laptop sat in the dorm room[2]. This got Fedora 15 and the explanation. Since she basically needed LibreOffice, Firefox/Chrome, and KDE's games, she really just needed to know how to open things and navigate between apps. There might have been questions about flash drives for file transfers, I don't remember. The only support calls I needed to field were related related to installing LaTeX (for a math class) since Kile isn't exactly the obvious search term and TeXLive doesn't show up in Package Kit without knowing package names (since there's no .desktop file) and Eclipse (for a required programming class).
The laptop is now a stock Fedora 17 or 18, now mainly used by Dad instead of the desktop while Mom has a Nexus 7. Now that I think on it, I don't think I explained GNOME3 to them, so maybe things are better with 17/18's GNOME3 (3.6?). I have been able to walk them through a fsck recovery in the systemd recovery shell (the battery for the laptop is aging very poorly), so maybe I'm just lucky :) .
My parents have been open-minded about the computers ever since Fedora 7 or so (I started experimenting with Fedora 5, using around Fedora 6). When I left for college, I told them that getting Windows was either going to involve a new computer (unnecessary) or buying a license straight up (not worth the price). Plus, my Windows support calls usually involved frustration on both ends of the call.
[1]One USB port had the habit of hard powering down the machine when one (but only one) of my flashdrives was plugged in, so I told her to try to avoid that port in case there was another drive out there that did the same. To be fair, it has since happened with other machines and the same drive, so maybe it needs replacing now :( .
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