Changes and complaints

Posted Mar 1, 2012 13:05 UTC (Thu) by slashdot (guest, #22014)
Parent article: Changes and complaints

The problem is that changes must NEVER remove existing features and workflows!

If you think you can make a better UI by redesigning it from scratch, awesome, but you MUST do one of these:
1. Make the new UI a strict superset of the old, so that it can be used like the old if desired (and it's possible to only enable some of the changes)
2. Keep maintaining the old one forever, or at least until it's clear that it's obsolete (note that, instead, the new one might turn out to suck)
3. Make it clear that your desktop is just a research toy, and strongly discourage distributions from making it the default

Simply, the desktops must treat the UI just like the Linux kernel treats the user<->kernel API, which is never broken, except for obscure parts that are known to have no users.

Breaking existing features and workflows is NEVER ACCEPTABLE!

Anyone who disagrees with that should not be given any power over design decisions, and he should not be given the power to commit code without review.

Leadership is needed

Posted Mar 3, 2012 22:31 UTC (Sat) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]

Finally, someone else who gets it. I agree with you completely.

It seems to me that the problem is that the inmates are running the asylum. Hey, "crazy" people can come up with some good ideas--but they shouldn't also be the ones deciding when to replace the old with the new.

What is lacking in the FOSS [GUI] community is strong leadership. It's too much CADT right now.

Of course, volunteers can't be ordered about. What's needed is for the volunteers to submit voluntarily to some wise leadership and oversight. It reminds me of Debian: the DDs are in charge of their packages--but the ftpmasters are in charge of what makes it into the archive and gets released. If an upstream or a packager makes a really bad decision, that's fine--but the ftpmasters can prevent it from being released in Debian.

In the same way, GNOME and KDE, et al, need some cooler, wiser, visionary heads to oversee what gets released. Some devs want to redesign the GUI, or rewrite some core functionality from scratch? Fine--but those don't get released until they're stable and have feature-parity with existing software. Let them dogfood (the verb) until it's as good as they can make it, and let seriously interested testers use a development PPA to test it--but the rest of the world shouldn't have to put up with the garbage until it's not garbage anymore.