Confused [LWN.net]

Confused

Posted Nov 6, 2011 19:53 UTC (Sun) by ovitters (guest, #27950)
In reply to: Confused by kragilkragil2
Parent article: Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Just because not everyone noticed, doesn't negate that it was communicated. Doubting if that occurred while I am from the team who decided on this and communicated this: oh well. That people will miss such communication is a different topic.

I don't get what you mean with marketing and hasn't recovered. I disagree that FOSS marketing is only done on the internet. Ubuntu is very well known, and it is not due to just internet marketing. You still haven't provided data on KDE marketing. I don't think it is possible to get such data, so we make the best decision. But keeping fallback around forever was never the plan, nor in line with the choices we've made over the last years. Our decisions are pretty predictable.

Comparing GNOME3, to KDE4 is inaccurate. We've been giving pretty much the same answers and promises for a long time. GNOME 3.0 was really stable, we didn't say "oh just a development release" just before releasing. This is mostly what I surprised me about KDE4 (bit buggy + change of message just before release). We have delayed GNOME3 various times to increase the quality.

Think getting lots of criticism on big changes is close to impossible to avoid. The more users something has, the more bugs are discovered. What is stable for 1000 people might be really buggy once 100.000 people use it. But you have to release at one point, because 6 additional months with the same amount of people (1000) will have the same benefit as just having 100x the amount of people using it.
The focus within 3.x is iterative design. Designers are trying things out and changing things which do not work. Meaning: overview mode works slightly different in 3.2, and might change a bit again in 3.4 or 3.6. Same for Contacts and Documents.

Regarding your clarification on what you meant with regressions: I agree that changing user expectations is going to cause frustrations. It is annoying to suddenly have things work in a totally different way. I find most of that criticism totally logical and expected it. I saw the same during 2.0 though, except people seemed to be a bit more patient at that time.

IMO people have really high expectations of what a project can do and that bar raises each time you try and reach it.

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Confused

Posted Nov 22, 2011 2:59 UTC (Tue) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link] (1 responses)

Haha, GNOME 3 was only "stable" because it didn't do anything.

Change the font size? No.
Taskbar? No.
Single click application lanuch? No.
Applets? No.

It was like a "high quality" Hello World in my eyes.

I think most people complained about KDE4 for the same reasons. The functionality they were used to was gone. Not because it was buggy.

When something is buggy at least you can be reasonably sure it will eventually stabilize. It's even pretty easy to fix crashers and bugs as someone unfamiliar with the project. Major features, not so much.

When functionality is missing and the devs are saying, "you don't need that, you were doing it wrong!", that is what really annoys people.

KDE4 was quite different

Posted Nov 22, 2011 7:36 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I think most people complained about KDE4 for the same reasons. The functionality they were used to was gone. Not because it was buggy.

Nope. KDE 4.0 was as buggy as the come. It leaked memory, it crashed all the time. Limited functionality is was just an icing on the cake. GNOME3 is paradise in comparison: sure, some functions are missing, but at least the ones that are there work reliably.