[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

[Thilo Pfennig]

On 2/21/07, Linus Torvalds <torvalds at linux-foundation.org> wrote:


Would it be a bad idea to have a mode where you can't even do silly things
> like that by mistake? Keep the core menu entry fixed, for example? No
> doubt. When it comes to making a mess of it, my daughter is better at
> _creating_ the mess than she is at straightening the end result out.



I often wished that there would be something like a reset to default or
repair. (see also bug: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3D387947 ).

One other thing people hate is that they I forced to decide whiuch desktop
they end up (including myself). Isn't this the story (of at leats KDE and
GNOME): GNOME was invented because KDE was actually not really free. Now
both are. Now we have different toolkits and also different development
strategies. But users use both desktops (and also  many love XFCE).  So a
free desktop tends to be "dirty" in the sense that people switch back and
forth and rarely use a clean desktop. And OTOH outside of Linux community
really cares about all these desktops. But if one follows discussions and
blogs one would think that these desktops are really of any importance
(which they are not in the computer world, still). If a company or a local
government switches to one of these desktops then this mostly because of the
contacts they had and primarily decisions are based on some facts. Same is
true for a single user.

So our discussions are mostly of the base. There are some aspects of
usability and coolness that users like. And some things they can not
understand. I was a bit surprised to find out that in KDE you actually have
to copy files in $HOME/.autostart to get applications started (standard
Kubuntu). There seems to be a control center plugin that we did install but
was actually not visible. I wonder if no KDE user ever wanted to have some
applications started by default. I did not find any solutions on the net.
Actually we were about to install workrave - maybe there is a simple way but
that is absolutely not intuitive nur visible. Honestly in GNOME there is a
solution but it is rather hidden as a tab in "Sessions".

On these occasions one gets the impression that users and developers
sometimes do not really communicate well. I have experienced this witht the
epiphany browser where the adblock extension was not enabled by default for
years (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3D364285) . This sure meant
that you just could not use epiphany as a browser nowadays - well I could
not. I dont want to browse through all the ads. It's interesting - because I
really think that this has driven MANY users to Firefox and mabye this is
one of the reasons that even the GNOME orientated distros prefer Firefox. I
think that often its the small things that can be REALLY important for a
user. epiphany had and has some great usability pros but also still some
cons that are not resolved for years. And this is only one application.

Maybe it would be good to maintain more flavors of a desktop or application
- one which is pure and one which contains some dirty hacks but solve
problems for the user. I think that the GNOME way is better in the very long
run - but this means that one has to live with some cons for 10 years till
there is a really clean solution. And that is not acceptable, even if it
will be the better solution then.


regards,


Thilo


-- =

Thilo Pfennig
http://wiki.foresightlinux.com/confluence/display/~vinci/
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