Thinking about Dogfood

[Aaron Weber <aaron ximian com>]

Hello world,

I've been thinking recently about the ways that we can expand
our audience for GNOME. We want GNOME to be totally friendly, but is it
really?

Think about this:
* Most GNU/Linux and UNIX users would be lost without a terminal.
* Most computer users would be lost *with* a terminal.

What sorts of things do I do in a terminal? How about...
  $ locate ".mp3" |grep aphex
  $ gcc foo.c (insert a billion compile-time options here)
  $ cat /etc/httpd/conf/http.conf |grep "mystuff"

Honestly, one ought to be able to find a file, write and compile a
program, and administer apache, without a command prompt. Without pipes.
Can I? Not really.  Sure, there's Comanche. There's Nautilus.  There's
gIDE. But are they as easy to learn and easy to use as the competing
proprietary tools?  Why not? What can we do to make them better?

How are we going to attract a larger developer base? How are we going to
attract a larger user base?  Will Jane VBScript feel like our tools are
improving her productivity? Will Joe "Has it got the Internet On it"
Sixpack want to use our desktop to post his eBay auctions?

Someone wrote in to us recently and suggested that "If you want GNOME to
be really usable, force all the programmers to stop using a shell, and
watch them hack it until it is."

That would be a little drastic, of course.  But how many of us actually
use the GUI tools we develop on a daily basis? Not enough. Can you
imagine doing your work without a terminal? No? That's a bad sign. You
may have the terminal if you want it, but *you should be able to go
through a day without it*.

Don't say "It takes too long to click through the filesystem." Nobody
clicks through the filesystem on a Windows box.  They 
type Windowskey+F and search. On a Mac its Apple-F. Or they type the
path in the location bar and expand it. It remembers where they go and
offers suggestions. Nobody spends all day in a Windows box traversing
directories or typing in commands.

Don't say "I'm an expert, this is the best tool for me."  Don't say "You
can't take my terminal away from me."  I'm not trying to do that.

What I'm saying is, for a few minutes every day, try to put yourself in
your user's shoes. Open Nautilus on a daily basis and clean up your home
dir with it. Check your mail with Evolution at least once a day. Use
gIDE or Anjuta to compile something. Spend some time dogfooding, and
report your findings (constructive and polite!) to the bugzillas and to
your friends.  If it hurts, that's GOOD-- you're fining what needs to be
fixed. I'm going to do this more, and I'd suggest that you do too. The
future of GNOME depends on it.

Aaron Weber
Ximian, Inc.
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