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Gnome 2.6 Usability Review
TuringTest writes ""The user-centric UI webzine" UserInstinct has published a usability overview of the latest version of the GNOME desktop. While their conclusions and recommendations are not mind-blowing, it includes two interesting appendices with a survey of new users (and their reactions to the system) and a list of common tasks of modern computer users with a commentary on how Gnome performs in each one. Note that usually You Only Need to Test With 5 Users (this report tests 4), you need to test additional users when an interface has several highly distinct groups of users and thus the conclusions in this review should not be taken as definitive."
You have spammed this message on OSNews, and now you are spamming it here, and God knows where else. This is called spam.
Project GoneME: Spamming my Gnome Project.
Jason Lotito
Wow. You think back a long way. Lemme see... Sawfish was the default WM in Gnome 1.4, and enlightenment was an option. Therefore, enlightenment must have been the default before that. Metacity has been the default WM since earrly in the 2.0 series.
:/
And are forgetting something about KDE? You complain about gmc (which hasn't been the filemanager for Gnome for several years. Around the same time, kde changed from KFM to Konqueror...
And Epiphany is still thedefault browser. The progression was this, actually: Galeon->Ephiphany. Mozilla was never official, and nautilus isn't even a browser.
And if I hear one more KDE user complaining about Gnome's slowness, I'm gonna be confused. Wait, I'm confused already. EVERYTHING about KDE and Qt is slow. One of Gnome's plusses is that Gtk is very snappy- and so therefore is Gnome.
As for integration, I'll take the fact that I can use my Gnome apps in other WM's without waiting for a 10 minute *_init startup procedure, whereas KDE with its KParts and DCOP makes all KDE apps useless anywhere else.
Finally, as for the Control Center, well, at least I can find applets. I mean, heck, KDE has what, a hundred control center applets? A new user (I upgraded from KDE 1.2 to 3.0- big step) needs to use the Search function to do ANYTHING.
PS: Right-click on pager, hit Preferences. Pretty simple...
PPS: Yes, I understand that this will be modded -1 Troll. Oh well.
My Systems
1. Pragmatic Issues
a) SourceForge a the hosting site. Freshmeat is an announcing site. The two serve entirely different needs.
b) The same people who run SourceForge (OSDN) also run Freshmeat. I couldn't trust OSDN to not delete announcements for my project. Why the hell should I give them the power to delete the disk space which contains all my work and any CVS commits from contributors?
2. Broader Issues
The interesting thing about the Open Source community is that they present themselves as a single entity when they talk about how they're united and taking over the world and how damned superior Open Source is. But the instant someone has a problem, whether that problem is something like the way they've been treated by the OSS community, usability problems, etc, the Open Source community dissolves into a random collection of people who accuse the person with the problem of criticizing a random collection of people, none of whom represent Open Source. And once they're done chewing that person out, they go back to being a "single entity" that considers itself united in its struggle to take over the world through its "better" method of creating software.
Guerrillas and paramilitary death squads have similar "attack as one->disperse into a large anonymous crowd that can't be attacked->regroup->attack" MO's. And so do proprietary companies who try to deflect criticism by breaking the product up into a million vendors each of whom doesn't accept responsibility and blames the other vendor.
It's ironic how more and more the Open Source community resembles the people they preach against.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!