[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Linus Torvalds
torvalds at osdl.org
Mon Dec 12 22:24:41 PST 2005
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>
> Kind of a truism there. The interesting discussion is about how to
> implement software design in practice. The way you're phrasing it, it
> sounds as if software without infinite/all-possible features all
> equally emphasized and accessible is somehow broken. You aren't giving
> any kind of guideline for what to include or exclude or emphasize.[1]
Arguing by reductio-ad-absurdum is a known logical fallacy. Yet you do
it.
Taking _anything_ to the extreme is bad. And no, that's not at all the way
I was phrasing it, even if you'd like to put it that way just to be able
to ignore my argument.
The thing that people were talking about were not in the least "all
possible features". In fact, I explicitly pointed out that the feature _I_
find most irritating is one that EVERY SINGLE other WM implements. Except
the default gnome one.
And the feature that started this discussion wasn't some "infinite" or
"all-possible" one. No, it was a feature that was mentioned as already
being done by the KDE equivalent, and having been shot down by gnome
people as being against "usability".
In other words, nobody expects gnome to be "infinitely flexible".
What I (and everybody I've seen) are arguing for is that gnome should not
be _less_ flexible than the alternatives.
Yet currently it clearly is. By a mile. Often the reason is quoted as
being because of "usability". Preferably together with a high-and-mighty
smirk about how technical people don't understand it, and that nipples
are intuitive.
Linus
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