On Mon, 2002-04-29 at 05:38, Havoc Pennington wrote: > Rui Miguel Silva Seabra <rms 1407 org> writes: > > what's > > bad is the erradication of pleasure from user experience of more > > advanced users. > Plenty of very advanced users (myself included) have zero interest in > all those Sawfish options, and click "don't show again" on all the web > browser warning dialogs, knowing exactly what the risks of doing that > are. Some even (horrors) use Windows or OS X from time to time and > like many things about the experience. And also plenty do :) > So I think you're wrong to say that your desire for more preferences > is an attribute of advanced users vs. non-advanced. It's also wrong to > say that people _want_ to learn about or think about this sort of > stuff. Because most don't. I don't. I don't care. I want the computer > to work and stay out of my way. ;-) Exactly, and if I don't like the way one thing works as set by default, I WAS able to change it witout resorting to compilation. > Red Hat is full of nontechnical people using Linux; and _none_ of them > change the defaults appreciably. At most they change the desktop > background. It's not because they don't know how; it's because they do > not care to know and knowing has no benefit for them. > > I'm not knit picking, I'm just worried about the current course of > > things. > I'm going to be vain and quote my own article: I read your article, and I believe it is fundamentally flawed because of bad premises. > For any program, there are literally an infinite number of > possible preferences. Each one has a cost. A program with infinite > preferences is therefore infinitely bad. But clearly some > preferences are genuinely useful and important. So the UI > developer's job is to choose the useful subset of possible > preferences. For easy display access, yes I agree. I will quote (in the end) a posting on a similar thread (on another mlist) by Jesper Skov, who proposes a VERY GOOD way to go around this problem (of advanced features) > An argument that "preferences are good" or "preferences are bad" > is clearly unproductive. Only an argument that draws a line > between when a preference should exist, and when it should not, is > a meaningful argument that impacts real-world developer decisions. > You're just saying "preferences are good" - that isn't useful. How > would you decide which to have? Exactly, keep all of them. Some may need relocation. > But in any case, even assuming you were right and there _was_ an > inherent conflict between advanced and normal users - which I think is > pretty much untrue - the whole _point_ of GNOME is to bring UNIX/Linux > to more nontechnical users, and that always has been the point. So if > there's a conflict, yes, advanced users lose. _IF_ there's a conflict, > someone has to lose, by definition. That's what conflict means. No. A situation os never limited to combinations of win/loose but of win/loose/neutral . I'd rather something like: 'new or inexperienced or "don't care" users win'/'all others neutral' > In summary: > - you state that there's an advanced vs. not advanced conflict no, I claim that there are bad decisions being taken in light of a holy crusade for users who know only windows :) > - you then want GNOME to cater to advanced users no, I want GNOME to not drive away advanced users --> they frequently are the-not-paid-for-it developers. > - but the whole point of GNOME always has been to make > the desktop easy to use for non-advanced users Quoting from the web page: "The GNOME project was born as an effort to create an entirely free desktop environment for free systems. From the start, the main objective of GNOME has been to provide a user friendly suite of applications and an easy-to-use desktop." Not an easy to use for non-advanced users. Easy-to-use [ for all ]. > Based on seeing many advanced users' desktops, I'd say almost no one > uses both at once, even among advanced users. Many advanced users > don't even know the difference between the two. KDE has pretty much > never supported viewports and lots of advanced users use KDE. Oh, they don't ? Then they probably don't have a very long unix historial at all. I don't have a very long one and I used workspaces and viewports in AfterStep, a not really so long time ago on DG-UX xterminal based systems. > So step back and ask yourself why you're different from these other > advanced users. Is it simply that you're _used_ to doing things the > way you do them? > I would bet that's the reason. You had to change how you work. Then > you got grumpy about it. I understand that completely. Let's see if i can make something plain: I do not define the averge user, you do not define the average user, no one can define the average user. There are too many subsets of users, and most of them interssect at a point or another. In my particular situation, I was feeling forced to use a far weaker (more limited) implementation of multiple areas, not to do things differently. > However, two points: > - you started your mail by asking all users to change how they work > in order to learn a bunch of boring things about their computer > that have nothing to do with getting their work done. But you won't > change how _you_ work. ;-) Inconsistent! huh? that's maybe because you're confusing somehing I said (I'm not a natural english speaker so it's not impossible that something got lost) and you're also trying to make this a 'me me me' situation. I've seen others around here becoming rather unhappy with this regression. > - if we don't ask anyone to change how they work, then we must ship a > desktop that's configurable to be like any other desktop ever > shipped by anyone ever. Which is indeed what many free software UIs > are like. Bloated, low-quality, bad combinations of every idea from > Mac, Windows, OS/2, Amiga, RISC OS, CDE, etc. etc. etc. Fscking no! You're regressing GNOME to Mac, Windows, OS/2, Amiga, CDE etc. Windows is not terribly boalted in terms of settings... the office suits are :) I am glad I've stopped using windows at all some years ago, but I still find it amusing when people still have to use the local printer option to install a remote ip printer ]:->>> > I totally understand and sympathize that no one likes to change how > they work. I don't either. But if we want GNOME to be any good, we > have to be better than traditional free software, and that means > asking current free software users to change. However, you're taking bad advice. If you want GNOME to be any good, you have to make it better than ANY software of the same kind. You're regressing GNOME desktops to windows shell, or worse, without giving a reasonable option to other users. And now the time to quote Jesper has arrived: However, there's no law against new ways of doing things. So I'd suggest, in addition to the existing pref tabs, we get one that's called "raw options", "advanced", or something like that, containing *all* options. It should *not* include buttons, check boxes, fields and whatnot laid out in the normal (and very space consuming way). It should contain a list with two columns: option name setting the setting column should be able to hold check boxes, fields and whatever necessary. It should also allow searching. The option name column should have tooltips describing the action of the individual option. And the list should be searchable, and sortable on both option name and setting. This has several advantages that I can see: o options collected in one place o options available in AbiWord, not just the config file o doesn't take up gazillions of preference tabs on acount of needing fancy&bloaty layout. o doesn't need development time to make said layout o allows quick overview of what options are enabled/disabled o allows searching for options The only disadvantage I can think of is that there's probably no existing widget that does all this for us. So it has to be programmed. But then, it only has to be programmed once. End quote. This is far more reasonable that the last resort of changing the source on every release, or trying to find a preference in the zillion entries in gconf. If you want to give an example of too many clutter to set an option, please use gconf in the future and never xchat :) I'm probably willing to give a thought about this (maybe making that a library). Hugs, rms -- + No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown + Whatever you do will be insignificant, | but it is very important that you do it -- Ghandi + So let's do it...?
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