The GNOME project at 15

I'd like to disagree. I admin a lab environment in a public library. It is running GNOME2. It works, the sort of general public you get in a rural public library setting use the machines with few problems. I get the occasional complaint when they can't install some Windows app, but no lab setting would allow that sort of thing even if it were Windows PCs. Everybody is basically happy.

I want you to imagine putting GNOME3 into that setting. Now I see one of two possible answers you can give:

1. Sure, that is a great idea. I'd disagree but ok we can disagree. Heck, if you or one of the current core gnome devs actually said that I might even be tempted to run the experiment and find out. It wouldn't be that hard to convert a couple of machines, put a 'try this, it's new!' sign on em and collect feedback.

2. Or you have my reaction, which is "Are you nuts?" At which point you might want to ask yourself whether that just might be a problem.

Every time GNOME3 comes up somebody says "sure it brought my work to a halt for a week|month|whatever but then I figured it out and now love it!" Just can't see telling that to random people off the street who just want to use a computer for an hour.

So we now have in GNOME3 a UI that while a few users like it, most existing users are (at best) indifferent to it and new users will be so confused by it that most won't ever find out if they like it.

I'm not someone who had a hand in GNOME 3 so I don't know the rationales. Nor have I followed most of the flames about it, nor been immersed in Linux user feedback lately, other than myself. So I've been trying to stay out of any debates about how GNOME 3 works in specific. I don't have a lot to say other than "it works well for me" and I know I do a lot of things differently than most people.

From general knowledge I would expect that anyone switching to GNOME 3 will hit speedbumps and initially be annoyed. I'm sure your wife would be. This is the cost of any big change. Whether the change is worth it in this case requires knowledge that I don't have.

It's easy to say CADT but it's also easy to point to countless technologies that became old and stale and were crushed by newer replacements. There isn't some easy guideline, like "never" or "always" change things. "It depends."

fwiw, I know enough about the tech to tell you that GNOME 3 is not from scratch by any stretch. GNOME 1.x -> 2.x preserved a lot less code. GNOME 3 is essentially a new UI in the window manager (but keeping a lot of existing tricky WM logic from Metacity), dropping some deprecated stuff, etc. What changed is very visible but not necessarily that huge code-wise. See also http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000356.html
The issue is that the pixels changed.

I'm not trying to tell anyone that GNOME 3 will definitely succeed. There are just certain arguments about it that I think are wrong.

The bottom line is that success or failure, just as with GNOME 2 or anything else, will come down to detailed judgments about specifics. The developers will have to get it right, or not.

I wouldn't venture to say whether it's on the right path, on balance, without better visibility and immersion in the strategy and the feedback. For GNOME 2 I had the daily feed of raw information, now I just have my own usage and occasionally reading an article like this one or whatever.

It doesn't mean that if you're getting flamed you're going to succeed, but it does mean that you _might_ be right to do something that gets you flamed. You also might _not_ be right. That's the hard part. One needs to figure it out.

I'm not a believer that decisions can be made mechanically through data collection. I do believe that the right kind of data is an important input into judgment and experimentation.

I think it's wrong to say there's no data now. If a developer is reading feedback, reading bugs, looking at how everyone around them configures their desktop, running the occasional user study, talking to customers if they're at a company, using the software themselves, etc. then they are getting a lot of data. It isn't a "study" but there's still a lot of basis to identify and figure out problems.

When I was actively maintaining metacity then I had FAR more information about how it could work and why and what kind of people would like solution A vs. B, than I currently have about gnome-shell or other WMs. If I were suddenly maintaining some other WM today, I'd have to spend months immersed and learning before changing anything much.

The point is that as a maintainer, I felt I had lots of decent information to base decisions on, and as a not-maintainer, I don't feel I have that information anymore.

There's this fantasy we all sometimes have that it can be a science and/or the answers are clear and cut-and-dried and/or that the developers could "prove" to us that they are right. But it's just too complex for that.

The alternative to "completely mechanical" is not "completely random/subjective" though. There's still a lot of room for good or bad judgment, based on good data or not. "Judgment" is not the same as "subjective opinion."

More data can always be good (with privacy protections in place, wouldn't it be great to auto-collect from all Fedora users which config options they had changed and what desktop they used, for example? that would be handy and 10000x more valid than a web poll).

Again: I'm not trying to get into whether project XYZ's judgment about topic ABC is _correct_. Judgment can always be wrong. What I don't agree with is what many imply, that judgment is the wrong _process_ and could be replaced with something more mechanical.

On the specific issue of whether "the silent majority wants this" can be an all-purpose excuse: it certainly could be used that way. When I was daily immersed in metacity-related data, I think I had a reasonable basis to know what was of general 80%-ish interest and what was one or two people or what was 15%-ish of people. So I would think the current GNOME maintainers also have some decent data on that front. But _could_ they ignore the data, use "silent majority" as an excuse and not really think it through? Of course they could. Do they? I don't assume that by default.

Re: marketing.

Perhaps the make-or-break marketing thing for Linux desktops is to be included in distributions, especially by default. If GNOME were a for-profit company and I were CEO, then getting Ubuntu back on board would be on the top of my list. Distributions are where the ... distribution ... is.

Re: "confusing"

A little tangent ... lots of times "confusing" is not a good way to think about UI-goodness. I say it too, but "relevant" or "appropriate" would be better metrics.

One reason is that "not confusing" does not mean "good" (problem = "I really quickly understood how this works, but I don't want to do what it does"). "confusing" does not always mean "bad" either ("oh, now that I get it, this will save me hours of time"). The "confusing" dimension gives little direction. (This is a limitation of "how long to do the task" user studies...)

Another reason is that "IQ" or even "computer savvy" isn't the relevant distinction among the groups. It's more like "what previous UIs do I have experience with" and "how much do I like to mess with the computer vs. focus on other things." I really dislike narratives around "power user"/"dumb down" because they imply some type of progression or ranking, when what you really have are people who care about different priorities or have a different set of life experiences. To get a relevant/appropriate design you have to think about that.

At one point long ago we were trying to make the "tweak tool" UI be a "people who are used to Unix" UI, like "Unix options" or something. That had some other pros and cons I don't remember, but one "pro" is that it makes clear what the UI is supposed to achieve, while "it's for power users"/"it's for confusing stuff" really does not. If it's framed positively like that then you can start saying "what are all the things Unix users will be used to," etc. and try to get that stuff presented nicely.

I was quite active in the "grumpy editor review" post some time back.

Of course, our efforts could have been a little more aggressive. I agree that marketing could be a little better than it was, but it wasn't like that there was no efforts made. Marketing team tried to do best there with presentations at conferences, giving out live cds, participating in social networks. There has been a lot less negative feedbacks on the social networks than through older channels like slashdot (which is a loss), lwn.net etc.