Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it) [LWN.net]

Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 18, 2012 17:28 UTC (Sat) by boog (subscriber, #30882)
In reply to: Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it) by ovitters
Parent article: Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

"just in some region of Spain, we have 600.000 users"

The quote concerns an official distribution imposed throughout much of the administration of Andalucia. Those users have no choice.

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Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 20, 2012 8:44 UTC (Mon) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (2 responses)

Unless hey signed an NDA regarding their dislike of GNOME, your point makes no sense.

Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 20, 2012 19:50 UTC (Mon) by boog (subscriber, #30882) [Link] (1 responses)

My comment was meant to address the implicit suggestion that 600000 users can't be wrong and they chose that desktop. Turns out that they had no say in the matter. Moreover Andalucian Regional Council administrative staff are very unlikely to have accounts on LWN or to hang out on whatever gnome IRC channel. Even the manager would have to be quite brave not to go with the default desktop environment. So, yes, it is great that linux and gnome are seeing such huge installs. But I think my comment did make some sense: this was no argument that many users are happy with the specific direction that gnome is taking.

Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 20, 2012 21:38 UTC (Mon) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

Ah, but that is not what I wanted to suggest or imply.

What I meant with the 600000 users is that it is *very* difficult to get reliable data on what is good for existing GNOME users. I see for instance in these replies that some were concerned that their needs weren't asked. But if you have so many users just in some region of Spain, it is going to be really easy to miss out on a large chunk of them.

Again, I didn't want to suggest they made some concious decision for GNOME. IMO, a lot of people don't choose their Operating System conciously.