Re: A Violent Realisation [Was: Preferences]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Dick Porter <dick ximian com> writes:
>  Simple question: would gtk themes get past
> the "bare minimalist" UI design squad today?

Yes. Themes are a good preference and worth the cost of having them.
Users have very different aesthetic tastes; themes don't add
implementation complexity beyond what i18n and accessibility already
require; themes are easy to understand and not confusing. (Assuming
all the themes are basically sane; themes that make buttons look like
text boxes could obviously be bad, but we don't have those.)

> By all means make GNOME usable for the newbies, but please dont make it
> alienate the more experienced Unix users and other hackers.

(Aside: I'd like to switch to saying "traditional free software users"
instead of "experienced users" or "hackers" - because I think the
target audience for improving the UI is mostly sysadmins and software
developers, technical people. Just not the ones used to fvwm2.)

We have to do the basics, like still allowing window manager focus
mode. But we aren't going to be able to support every option in every
OS ever deployed, and take every add-a-preference patch. And that's
what would be required to avoid _any_ complaints. If we don't add
_everything_ then _someone_ is going to have to change how they work.
Can you disagree with that?

So simple preferences that don't break the conceptual model of the
desktop and really add a lot of appeal to traditional users are fine. 
e.g. focus mode. But we have to draw a line.

So I would ask you to explain where you would draw that line, other
than saying "I would not leave out the features that I use
personally." Because we have to leave out something that _someone_
uses.

Ultimately, keep in mind that if you are a huge fvwm2 fan and have
always used that, you can keep doing so. Why should GNOME slavishly
follow all these past free software UIs? What's the point of making a
new desktop that's just like the old ones?

We standardize things on freedesktop.org so that anyone who wants to
create a drop-in replacement for part of GNOME can do so.

Havoc