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 19, 2012 11:29 UTC (Sun) by slashdot (guest, #22014)
In reply to: Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it) by drago01
Parent article: Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

The use case is investing a lot of time in learning about and tweaking a system to their desires, either because they simply enjoy doing that, or to improve later user experience.

The non-power user instead wants to be able to use their computer with minimal initial time investment (and thus minimal learning and minimal configuration), and doesn't mind the inevitably less efficient and less customized user experience he is limited to due to that.

For example, a power user will tend to purchase a new computer by researching and separately ordering each component, and often assembling it himself, while the non-power user will just quickly choose a pre-assembled machine from the site of a major oEM.

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

Posted Feb 19, 2012 13:23 UTC (Sun) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link] (6 responses)

> The use case is investing a lot of time in learning about and tweaking a system to their desires, either because they simply enjoy doing that, or to improve later user experience.

OK, so how does the extension system does not fit that use case? It provides a level of customization no other desktop ever provided. It allows editing everything the UI, the behavior of the UI, add new UI elements ... in 3.4 we now support sub classing gobjects / implementing them in JS which mean extensions can even do more stuff. The have almost the complete control of the UI.

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

Posted Feb 19, 2012 19:27 UTC (Sun) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link] (5 responses)

Do you understand that to take advantage of the extension system you have to know how to program in Javascript and/or other languages? If you fail to grasp this simple notion continuing this discussion is pointless.

Rehdon

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

Posted Feb 19, 2012 19:38 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Only one person has to know javascript enough to write a extension. Everyone else doesn't have to. In most cases, you already have a extension available to tweak what you want.

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

Posted Feb 19, 2012 21:26 UTC (Sun) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link] (3 responses)

> Do you understand that to take advantage of the extension system you have to know how to program in Javascript and/or other languages?

That's simply untrue. You need to learn Javascript in order to write your own extension but you don't need any programming skills to install one (it just two three clicks can't be that hard really).

> and/or other languages

FWIW JS is enough.

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

Posted Feb 21, 2012 6:31 UTC (Tue) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link] (2 responses)

I meant "take advantage of the extension system" to modify or add configuration options to a Gnome Shell environment, I'm not talking about installing an extension. I guess an advanced user (or power user) would know how to do that. Are you just playing with words?

To sum it up:

- what in Gnome 2.x was available as configuration options to all users as part of the standard environment, now is not there and you have to know about extensions;
- extensions can conflict with each other;
- extensions will have to be re-installed for each Gnome Shell version;
- if you can't find an extension doing what you want, you have to program it yourself.

Now tell me that's not a REGRESSION with respect to what we had before. To gain what? Bling and big buttons? Thanks but no, thanks.

Rehdon

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

Posted Feb 21, 2012 10:50 UTC (Tue) by cmm (guest, #81305) [Link] (1 responses)

> extensions will have to be re-installed for each Gnome Shell version

Tell me this is not true! I'm having a hard time keeping my palm off my face as it is!

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

Posted Feb 21, 2012 13:25 UTC (Tue) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link]

I'm using Linux Mint and had to carefully choose extensions to have a stable system, some of them were only working for a different Gnome 3 version. Support for automatic update will only be available starting from Gnome 3.4 iirc, so if you're patient enough you won't have to re-install updated versions by hand.

Frankly, I switched to Cinnamon and forgot about all that.

Rehdon