Questioning corporate involvement in GNOME development

Posted Jun 2, 2014 10:20 UTC (Mon) by Felix (guest, #36445)
In reply to: Questioning corporate involvement in GNOME development by ovitters
Parent article: Questioning corporate involvement in GNOME development

well, one thing that annoys me with the GNOME 3 development is that there were a lot of changes which I think were outright UX bad decisions. Some of them were fixed by extensions (e.g. AlternateTab from the Gnome classic mode) but other things got worse (e.g. type-ahead find in Nautilus, notifications). What puzzles me is that I don't see a place where I could raise my concerns and not talking to a wall.

For example type-ahead find in Nautils (gone in 3.8 or so): I found out about that change after updating Fedora. Googling what the rationale is. (IIRC) one developer said (before the final Nautilus release) "don't worry Nautilus search will be as fast as the old type-ahead search".

Except it isn't for me: First due to my folder organization (which I *won't* change) I often have many folders with the same name in a subtree. And second even if the first hit is the right folder I can't navigate as fast as possible because somehow Nautilus is lagging in that case (I suspect this is because dozens of search results are displayed, some thumbnailing starts and I'm experiencing I/O waits).

Things like that really annoy me on a daily basis. That being said the Gnome Shell (for me) has more good features than bad things (workspace organization) so I'm still using it.

Questioning corporate involvement in GNOME development

Posted Jun 5, 2014 3:48 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (4 responses)

Honestly, as a GNOME developer, I admit search in Nautilus is really bad. I'm not sure we need to go back to type-ahead find, but I think that was far better than what we have now.

I wonder what you dislike about notifications, though: I find them informative yet unobtrusive.

Dealing with lots of user feedback is difficult, particularly when it conflicts with the design vision, but I've seen many cases where it has influenced the direction of GNOME software (e.g. the wired status indicator, or the ongoing push to restore terminal transparency). The biggest limiting factor is often developer resources: if I want to fix Bug A or implement Feature B and a user wants me to fix Bug C and implement Feature D, I'm probably going to fix Bug A and implement Feature B.

Questioning corporate involvement in GNOME development

Posted Jun 5, 2014 12:21 UTC (Thu) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link] (1 responses)

When you start to "redesign" an interface for potentially millions of new users, and alienate tens of thousands of active users in the process, you may end up with a very small community to promote your new interface.

And I think that effectively happened with Gnome3.

PS I am a Gnome user ever since it existed (before I used WindowMaker), never really used KDE or anything else.

I don't like Gnome3 (on Fedora) compared to Gnome2 on many accounts. It looks nice, but it works impaired and frustrates me every time I use it. Luckily since I use RHEL mostly (and only occasionally Fedora) I wasn't affected, but now with RHEL7 coming to my desktop I hope the transition is not going to alienate me.

Questioning corporate involvement in GNOME development

Posted Jun 5, 2014 13:29 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link]

You'll probably be using Classic Mode, the default in RHEL 7, which is intended to cater to users who preferred GNOME 2, with a menu for selecting applications, minimize buttons, etc. (I'm pretty sure Classic Mode is an example of development driven by Red Hat's corporate interests. I don't think that's a bad thing.)

Questioning corporate involvement in GNOME development

Posted Jun 5, 2014 16:09 UTC (Thu) by Felix (guest, #36445) [Link] (1 responses)

> Honestly, as a GNOME developer, I admit search in Nautilus is really bad.
> I'm not sure we need to go back to type-ahead find, but I think that was
> far better than what we have now.

I totally agree. Advanced search (e.g. full-text search, additional filters) is nice but the whole use case of quick keyboard-assisted navigation just went away.

> Dealing with lots of user feedback is difficult, particularly when it
> conflicts with the design vision, but I've seen many cases where it has
> influenced the direction of GNOME software (e.g. the wired status
> indicator, or the ongoing push to restore terminal transparency). The
> biggest limiting factor is often developer resources: if I want to fix
> Bug A or implement Feature B and a user wants me to fix Bug C and
> implement Feature D, I'm probably going to fix Bug A and implement
> Feature B.

I can sympathize with that opinion. However when you're changing something in major ways (and criticism is already voiced in blog comments when the change was presented) I think a developer should be prepared to deal with fallout instead of just moving on.

> I wonder what you dislike about notifications, though: I find them
> informative yet unobtrusive.

First of all I think they are too small (just being centered at the bottom). I didn't see a way to see multiple notificatons at once - some things might be more urgent than others but I don't want to "loose" the one on "top". So a kind of history would be good.

Then I have issues with the kind of notifications which are provided. To me this tied into the "systray" problem. I'd like to have some "notifications" which never expire (e.g. new IM message) - similar to jumping icons in the MacOS dock. And some notifications just bother me and I want to ignore them ("maybe your printer is not connected" - when I just started it and I already know it'll need a few more minutes until it configured it's network interface).

Questioning corporate involvement in GNOME development

Posted Jun 5, 2014 16:30 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

You might find this post from today interesting

http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/2014/06/05/notify-me/