A cash crunch at the GNOME Foundation

As for listening... I said basically, "Gnome 3 caused me a lot of wasted time and lost billable hours. It didn't have to be that way." To which you (and maybe others) said basically, "yes, it did, 3 and 2 in parallel was impossible, and it's not that big a deal anyway since Gnome 2.0 did the same thing." We reiterated ourselves a few times, nobody could understand the other's point of view, so that's that. Maybe I'm not listening either.

Still, I'm saddened that you still only see one pain point for one person. When Gnome 4 comes around, I suppose it's going to be another throw-your-users-in-the-shredder release. I just don't understand how a mature project can think that this is at all acceptable. Or why distros would accept such capricious instability in their default desktops.

Oh well.

(for the record, I was the one complaining about multiple monitors and netbooks. I don't think I've complained about Gnome 3's network speed, except maybe in quoting someone else.)

So you keep claiming, but I can tell you that this is not the case here. I couldn't give a rats' what they are building, as long it can do things for me, instead of me doing things for it. That's the point of having software, isn't it?

"They show you precisely what folks actually get stuck on, as opposed to what they say they get stuck on, or what you think they will get stuck on."

In theory that is what they should do. With enough funding, the right design and careful execution, they can do that. It's hard but not impossible.

But like studies in other fields, they can also give you the results you want, cheaply, quickly, and easily. Good design is difficult, and good experiments can get expensive. And who wants to waste a lot of time and money on a more elaborate experiment than they need to do before they get on with the fun part?

With unlimited resources and a lot of creativity and imagination you might make mockups of a few hundred different systems, built around different design assumptions, following users long term... yeah no one does that. Yet everyone seems to be able to draw from the much more limited work that's been done absolute certainty for their own preferred theories.

So usability studies are no panacea. They need to be looked at skeptically and yes, both designed and evaluated using common sense if you can find any. It seems to be quite rare though.

I see we are arguing semantics now. Many, when I used it first, meant not just "a new select group", which completely agrees with my later use of "not as many as before".

> "Working as intended" is not a bug, and expecting them to treat it as one is utterly foolish.

OK, so nobody can ever complain to software devs that "as intended" is not quite good enough? Right.

To be honest, I can understand the problem Gnome devs are facing. They chose to go with the "overview" design, which is neither a phone, nor a tablet, neither a desktop nor Windows 8 (hint: search "boot to desktop windows 8.1"). It would be almost impossible to admit now that that was a mistake.

It is if the intentions are wrong. That's what people are trying to tell them, that their design is fundamentally bad.

You know, although we'll clash in tone, I think you are basically right. GNOME took a turn off into space a long time ago (and I did not have to wait for 3 to see it, personally, but that is when it took over the 'face' of the project, so to speak, and a lot of people sat up and noticed it.)

And it really boils down to WAD. WAD is the developers way of saying 'sorry, I broke this on purpose. You may want stable, reliable software that you can rely on to do the job for you tomorrow the same way it did the job yesterday, but you arent going to get it. Now leave me alone while I build something new that I hope you will like. We want you to 'transition' from what we used to do, that you liked, to what we are doing now, which we hope you like. But if you dont like it, just go away, because we certainly are not going to listen to any feedback that does not agree with the plan we have already decided on.'

And from a developer perspective, particularly a developer who is either unpaid, or paid by someone that is all in favor of what they are doing, this has to seem essentially fair. Even so, can it really be a surprise that this angers many users? Just understanding when they start down this course that this is going to be very inconvenient for a lot of their users, that it will generate ill-will, and taking that into account in the planning, there would have been ways to minimize the ill will.

Instead they seem to have almost deliberately maximized the anger and I am not sure even today, this much later, that the backlash is anything but incomprehensible ludditism in their minds. It's not reasonable to expect someone to keep working for free on something they made and gave you for free, when they dont want to, just because you need it. I think most people understand that. But what really angers people is the responses like 'the only people complaining are professional complainers who are going to complain no matter what.' That attitude is what keeps the gnome haters stirred up enough to even bother reading their announcements, let alone posting.

But, yeah, regardless, I think they could have handled it better but in the end that's what it boils down to, they are not interested in working on the system we want to use, so we should go away.

At the very least the devolution of every GNOME discussion into a rehash of how much everyone hates Gnome3 is so old and predictable at this point it's redundant. I apologize for my part in it.