the default desktop [LWN.net]

the default desktop

Posted Feb 21, 2022 4:09 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: the default desktop by nix
Parent article: McGovern: Handing over

> 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.

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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. :) )