Re: Re: gnome-panel & gnome-applets?

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Tue, 2010-12-28 at 15:19 -0800, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:

> I don't want to see us alienate large swathes of our 3% desktop market
> share. :-)

I think this is a myth that should be debunked. at least, I strongly
believe that it *will* be debunked as soon as distributions start
shipping GNOME 3.x.

I don't believe for an *instant* that changing the UX will lead to
alienating but the minimal part of our user base.

the reason why I don't hold to that is that we will be losing users
either way if we just stay with 2.x; users won't stay with us just
because we never change the user experience from metacity + gnome-panel
+ a bunch of applets. users will go away sooner, as they always do when
a project is perceived to be stagnating.
 
so we can chose to change the user experience to something that might
attract new users, and maybe lose a bit of some hard core and vocal
minority in the process, or just stay the course, and never get new
users, and eventually lose what we have.

this risk-averse attitude is a clear indicator that we lost our edge -
in development, design and other things.

another thing that was pointed out by Xan on IRC earlier this evening
and that captures my thoughts precisely:

< xan> my impression is that people asked for years for the abstract
idea of "change" and "progress" against the perceived decadence of gnome
2.x but when faced with the real-world consequences of doing large
changes they completely reject it
< xan> they just want to magically get from here to there without living
the process

we can't get from 2.32 to 3.0 without ever losing features, or even
users; the whole point of re-designing the UX means losing something in
order to gain something else - features contradicting the new design
will just have to go away.

if this means losing some users, well, so be it: the potential of
attracting new users far outweighs it.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi