This is chicken and egg problem [LWN.net]

This is chicken and egg problem

Posted Nov 6, 2011 19:57 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Confused by kragilkragil2
Parent article: Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Oh I trust that by the time Gnome 3.10 is released most complains will be gone, but I wish user facing components would see gentler migrations, even if that would mean maintaining older components a lot longer and not making progress in other parts that fast.

"Gentler migration" is expensive and userspace is much larger then kernel. This is chicken-and-egg problem: there are very few customers which are ready to pay for desktop thus it's hard to do things like "gentler migrations" and because of regular "rough migrations" it's hard to attract users who will pay for desktop. It's not clear how this circle can broken.

Gnome could have learned a lot from KDE4, but didn't IMO.

They tried - but looks like "fallback mode" was just a waste of resources: looks like people either use GNOME Shell or they drop GNOME completely.

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This is chicken and egg problem

Posted Nov 7, 2011 7:43 UTC (Mon) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324) [Link] (4 responses)

(Apologies if these comments are unity-specific and don't apply to Gnome 3)

I haven't switched away, and since ubuntu 11.04 I've definitely started using the "classic" interface. I've tried unity for a week, and couldn't find half of the things I wanted to get working, not even with a lot of searching. I think if you want real data, a software-based poll or at least a widely announced poll on the web is required. Guessing either way is probably not adequate.

Personally, what I think is missing (for unity, I haven't tried gnome3) is documentation on how to use it. One of the major strong points of ubuntu was a well organized menu. In unity, I can't find anything. A "how to use unity effectively" tutorial would be a welcome addition, and could resolve a lot of the issues people are having. Having to search on the internet for hotkeys is not the right way, if you ask me.
Examples of things I could not find:

- how do I change the look/feel/behaviour? (answer: install a separate, non-default package. Found via google, not the menu or help)
- how do I make the icons smaller (1680 wide screen)?
- focus-follows-mouse and lazy-lock (can't do?)
- access to the original menu?
- access to the original system configuration tools?

I'll try again in a little while with ubuntu 11.10 to see if things have improved, but that list of problems is a bit too long for my taste. Add to that a couple of software bugs (image viewer won't go full screen, etc), and the fun is complete.

This is chicken and egg problem

Posted Nov 7, 2011 10:16 UTC (Mon) by jku (subscriber, #42379) [Link] (3 responses)

Getting real data is much, much more difficult than setting up a poll on the web. Think about it: Any amount of advertizement and announcements cannot remove the bias inherent in that method. A hundred people responding, 10000 people responding... They'll still have the same self-selection bias that cannot be fixed by increasing sample size.

This is chicken and egg problem

Posted Nov 8, 2011 9:00 UTC (Tue) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't quite understand your point - I probably misunderstood. If you're trying to find out how many people are actually using the fallback mode of gnome, wouldn't an automatic software solution (like debian popcon) be much more objective than a web poll? Of course a web poll would be easier to implement.

Anyway, I agree that getting objective data is hard no matter which method you choose. It may be enough to get a feeling for how intensively the fallback mode is used, though.

This is chicken and egg problem

Posted Nov 8, 2011 16:15 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

Privacy issues results in inreliable data. Popcon is not used by everyone, and I don't think it measures this. I think we would violate privacy laws if we would add code in GNOME to send such data.

That said, if we'd have something used by many, it would be interesting to see.

This is chicken and egg problem

Posted Nov 9, 2011 8:27 UTC (Wed) by jku (subscriber, #42379) [Link]

I was just pointing out that one of the solutions you suggested, a web poll, is useless for the task at hand -- it just can not answer questions like "how many people use X" or even "what percentage of people use Y".

This is chicken and egg problem

Posted Nov 8, 2011 18:53 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link]

I had Gnome on my netbook, and found it easier just to switch to XFCE while Gnome shell didn't work there. The fallback mode was too different from real Gnome 2 for my liking (or perhaps too similar, with just the right annoying minor differences).