the default desktop [LWN.net]

the default desktop

Posted Feb 21, 2022 0:47 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: the default desktop by rahulsundaram
Parent article: McGovern: Handing over

> If you are referring to https://stopthemingmy.app/ the prominent note on top says "Please read the letter all the way to the end. This is aimed at distributions breaking apps by default, not tinkerers playing with their own setup."

I'm thinking more of a large number of LWN comments from back in the day from various gnomers and gnome-attached people attacking people who dared to ask for more configurability, or not to break the configurability that was already there. (I now realise that this was probably so far back in the day that it may now be ancient history -- but memory of such things sticks, while how long ago it was does not.)

Random example, one of many, this utter trainwreck of a thread which I'd forgotten about until just now, in which a "GNOME marketing volunteer" or three attempt to convince everyone in sight that every single thing we bring up about our workflows, even font sizes, is something nobody would ever want to do and is totally unreasonable, *despite having people actively talking to them telling them about it*: <https://lwn.net/Articles/433409/>). The font-related stuff is towards the bottom: search for "tweak a font". There are even people there telling others to file bugzilla tickets if they want to change their font, because *obviously* everyone must be forced to use the exact same one.

Font sizes (and fonts in general) are particularly stupid things to make it hard to adjust, because the readability of a font depends not only on your display technology and resolution but also on your monitor distance, eyesight, possibly time of day and much else: heck I have a couple of fonts which are beautiful on one of my monitors and horrible on the other, and one that I find beautiful except when I'm tired, when it becomes a smeared mess, but only when viewed through my left eye. For almost everything in UI design, humans vary so much that there is no one good answer, so configurability is crucial.

I think this is also where I had my first encounter with the awful phrase "Linux is not about choice", to which my only answer is "yes it bloody well is, and just because you don't like users, or other developers, choosing things you disagree with doesn't mean they'll stop for your convenience, or suck up everything you change just because you want them to". That's at the very least showing contempt for your own userbase. Another of the tag team in that thread (the one in favour of unconfigurable font sizes) said elsewhere in the same thread that, and I quote, "people love change". Put the two together and apparently this means that people love change that is forced on them by software changes made by others, but they should not be allowed to make changes to even the smallest detail themselves without learning enough about the codebase to hack at it. This seems precisely 100% backwards to me.

(I note that you participated in that thread and are one of the few people there who behaved pleasantly throughout, certainly more so than I did!)

... ugh. I just reread the whole comment thread. One major plus of present-day GNOME, in addition to having brought a lot of the old configurability back: everyone involved is fairly pleasant to deal with and paternalistic assumptions that users know nothing and developers know what is best for them are largely absent. That definitely wasn't true back then. Good grief.

(And you're right, the slavery thing was hammering buttons I shouldn't have hammered. Sorry. Cross-pondian difference, I think. Probably wrongly, it's mostly considered irrelevant ancient history here, not a live issue.)

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the default desktop

Posted Feb 21, 2022 4:09 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

> I think this is also where I had my first encounter with the awful phrase "Linux is not about choice"

I don't think the phrase is awful in it's original context which was

https://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/200...

It wasn't about UI options but core plumbing.

> One major plus of present-day GNOME, in addition to having brought a lot of the old configurability back: everyone involved is fairly pleasant to deal with and paternalistic assumptions that users know nothing and developers know what is best for them are largely absent.

I am not involved with GNOME but you are right that things change over a decade. The prescient comment from the article itself is this:

"Strangely enough, this move proved to be unpopular with users, with the result that, over time, many of those options were added back. GNOME 3 shows signs of wanting to repeat this history; the end result may well be about the same."

I think there was some amount of confusion over immaturity in new versions vs explicit design choices and explicit design choices have evolved to be more agreeable. I think the lesson here is that it is high time for UI folks (and language folks like Python) to largely follow the incremental approach taken by the Linux kernel itself (after 2.4) going forward rather than try clean break and flag days approaches ever again. It burns out too many users who hold on to their experiences for a very long time.

the default desktop

Posted Feb 21, 2022 12:58 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

> I think the lesson here is that it is high time for UI folks (and language folks like Python) to largely follow the incremental approach taken by the Linux kernel itself (after 2.4) going forward rather than try clean break and flag days approaches ever again. It burns out too many users who hold on to their experiences for a very long time.

YES. The Emacs approach! (Only... perhaps Emacs takes it too far, not making disruptive changes like calling point the cursor position because that's the way it always worked. :) )