Re: How do I switch to Sawfish??

[Ali Akcaagac <ali akcaagac stud fh-wilhelmshaven de>]

On Mon, 2002-09-02 at 12:12, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> > > Sorry, GNOME 2 might be different from what you were expecting, or not
> > > include your favourite 'features' or 'options' that 1.x did, but does not
> > > rule out the fact that it's our cleanest and most stable release ever.
> 
> An important thing to realize which doesn't get said much (or maybe others 
> don't agree) is that Gnome 2 is a full-scale REVOLUTION.  Major 
> scaffolding has been massively improved, incredible thought processes have 
> culminated in really good guidelines, focus for the desktop, very clear 
> ideas of what Gnome wants to avoid in the future, bringing the 
> developers in line with these new ideas, and so on.

this was definately a long reading:

you heavily misunderstood me. i never said i don't like gnome 2. if this
was so then i probably won't use gnome anymore. i only don't like some
aspects of it. specially i complain about things like the button
ordering.

look i am trying to summarize the stuff i want to say without sounding
offending. problem in gnome is people tend to do things differently. a
bit too different for my taste. lemme give you a good example:

- amiga os - does [OK] [CANCEL]
- windows  - does [OK] [CANCEL]
- CDE      - does [OK] [CANCEL]
- KDE      - does [OK] [CANCEL]
- 90% of standalone apps [OK] [CANCEL]

well the problem here is gnome needs to do it differently and there is
no real reason for this. it was assumed that the way it was, was plain
wrong. it was told to us that the new behaviour was researched for a
long time and assumed to be good. in reallity things look different,
most of the people working on gnome are mac users and simply copied that
behaviour from os x. end of the long research thingy. oki i may
understand if people will say that this kind of feature is wrong and
that the button needs to get re-ordered to show [CANCEL] [OK] because of
what ever reasons there are. but to say the truth i am used to the wrong
way, i love the wrong way and i want the wrong way back. thats probably
the way many other people think.

what's wrong with it? why is there a need for gnome to do things much
more differently than it's used to be on different plattforms etc.?

e.g. another example i recently saw in gnome 2.2:

old 'metacity theme'
new 'window border appearance'

hig says:

the user don't know about windowmanagers, but the option to change
windowmanagers was put back into gnome 2.2 not bad for people that
shouldn't care about it.

why reinventing the wheel again and again. there is really no need for
all this stuff.

usability is for sure an important aspect of gnome, having menues
consistent, having buttons consistent, having descriptions of the items
consistent etc. having buttons layout pixel exact. but there is no need
to go own new ways. sometimes it's better keeping things as they it was
before without need to change. i am worried that gnome 2.2 will end in a
totally OVERCHANED desktop. soon we end up getting a free desktop but
then we need to pay for the glossarybook :)

make it simple doesn't mean change everything. make it simple basically
contains stuff like:

- exact button layout (pixelcorrect)
- keep the button ordering as they are in windows, kde, amigaos etc.
- people are used to words like 'themes' so leave it as 'themes'.
- frames are removed from all kind of applications, frames are used to
  group preferences that concerns one special thingy. to signal group of
  stuff.. most of them got removed now.

hope you understand what i am up to. i don't want to flame or offend
people but i think that gnome is drifting far away from popular systems.
doing things correct is not usually the correct way. look companies like
microsoft etc. spent million of dollars into quality, design etc. we can
start and have complain about microsoft windows for example. but to
summarize it the amount of hardware they support, the appearance and the
wide acceptance of it speaks for itself. there are qualified engineers
working on it's design they spent 15 and more years into it.

there is no real argument that you can tell the users why the button
re-ordering was needed. if it was the old way then no one probably ever
cared or recognized it but the new way definately pissed a lot of people
off specially those using gnome.

in case you don't know wether you need to decide for a way then better
go off and use the default way used by other operating systems. with
that way you can't do much wrong.

of course i have much respect for the gnome developers. but i think the
best way helping them is to say what i think as user.

i hope i haven't offended someone now. if so then i suggest opening a
special mailinglist for such kind of discussions where people can say
what they think without getting flamed for it. that way you get the best
results about what people think and what not.

-- 
Name....: Ali Akcaagac
Status..: Student Of Computer & Economic Science
E-Mail..: mailto:ali akcaagac stud fh-wilhelmshaven de
WWW.....: http://www.fh-wilhelmshaven.de/~akcaagaa