[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

Timothy D. Witham wookie at osdl.org
Mon Dec 12 20:42:07 PST 2005


On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 20:28 -0800, Alex Graveley wrote:
> For the record, I believe this is actually a precept of the Firefox 
> project, which is the most used open source desktop project by a fair 
> margin.
> 
   Well if the desktop was a single function then that would be 
a good example.  But the issue is that not everybody works the
same.  And removing configuration functionality for the sake
of simplicity in the user interface reduces the usefulness to
everybody who works differently than the folks who decided 
which way to work was the simplest.

   I will give you an example.  I've been using Evolution
since 2001 and every release has removed something
from the way I worked.  Made it a little less friendly to
me and a little more of  a pain in the ass to use.  I used
to really push Evolution to folks but since 2.0 I say "I
use it because I have been using it.  And if asked I
will say that I really feel that it is broken for my usage
model and that I have zero hope of it getting fixed."

   I don't need it to come out with my settings as the
default.  I'm all for default settings to make things
easy to use for a novice but when you remove the 
functionality so that an expert user can't get the
full value then that is a failure.

Tim



> -Alex
> 
> Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > That's _not_ like any other open source project I know about. Gnome seems 
> > to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not 
> > doign something is not "it's too complicated to do", but "it would confuse 
> > users".
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Timothy D. Witham - Chief Technology Officer - wookie at osdl.org
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