GNOME Ignoring its Own Users?

Jonathan writes "Some editorials were posted on the web the last few days about GNOME and its apparent lack of interest on user feedback, especially when GNOME pitches itself to follow a 'users first philosophy' in their press releases. OSNews started with an editorial about market research or lack thereof, Expert-Zone posted another one on how OSS must learn to take responsibility on its great success."

Comments

Don't feed the troll

[jmorris42]

Apparently CowboyNeal still cares what Eugenia thinks, but why the hell should anyone else?

Lets not feed the trolls, ok? The only time I see OSNews is when it gets a mention on /. and it is ALWAYS Eugenia trolling, this time is no exception.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[unixmaster]

Now she became a troll because she no longer writes pro Gnome articles?

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod up interesting. Despite what a handful of posters trying to get laid have claimed on the article about women leaving IT, women are utterly shit at using computers. Just like men are shit at ironing and washing clothes.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, my point was not that all women are "shit at using computers"...it was that women like Eugenia (she says she knows everything while obviously knowing nothing) are not a good image for women in IT. There are enough "know it? I invented it!"-types in IT as it is, without encouraging more, female or otherwise.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[rhavyn]

The only reason there is less trolling there is because most of the articles are written in unreadably bad english. The only things people can comment on his how they can't understand what the author is trying to say.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[jmorris42]

No, she was always a troll. She has delusions of relevance, understanding nothing about how and why OS/FS is created.

If she had a clue and wanted to do something useful she would quit her bitching and DO something. If she doesn't think the GNOME devels are going in the right direction and end user needs aren't being met, then DO something, talk is cheap in the Open Source world, show us a willingness to get your hands dirty and people will want to talk.

Devels aren't generally focus group types, they aren't normally 'people' people. So why doesn't she do what she claims to be good at and talk to these unwashed masses of end users she claims to speak for, find out specifically what they are crying out for and make concrete feature requests backed up by these user's problems? Because that would be hard WORK and wouldn't generate nearly as many pageviews on her website, which is what her job really is; stirring the pot and generating lots of traffic. Think Dvorak without the star power that comes from trolling for ZD for decades.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent comment. Thanks for posting it.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[JPriest]

So if you are not writing code of OSS then you are not entitled to an opinion? Also, she does contribute to things like look/feel/UI design etc.
There is more to creating applications than filling in code but your attitude does explain why things are the way they are Eg. "If you want it, write it, if you won't write it, STFU"

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Look! A troll on Slashdot! Way to prove your point!

Re:Don't feed the troll

[networkBoy]

I think the GP posters thought was not so much writing code as contributing in some way. If she took the time to do a comprehensive user survey and analyze the data, presenting the most relavent topics to the Devs in such a way that substantiates what the users need and why, then she'd not be trolling.

Feel free to correct me if I totally missed the point on this though.
-nB

Re:Don't feed the troll

[jmorris42]

> So if you are not writing code of OSS then you are not entitled to an opinion?

Talk about an inability to read.....

I said she should quit her vague bitching and DO something. Given that the typical devel is lacking in 'people' skills, whining that THEY aren't running polls and focus groups to discover what the mythical 'typical clueless end user' wants is pointless. She, on the other hand, claims to undertand these people so if she wants things to improve she should get off her butt and act as an interface between the end users and devels. Talk to these users, learn what they actually suffer from a lack of and make specific feature requests. But even then she shouldn't get too offended when an idea gets shot down. Not being a devel she has no way of really knowing when a suggestion would be a major PITA or not.

Those who aren't willing to CONTRIBUTE to an Open Source/Free Software project are not entitled to an opinion. But those who do not write code can still contribute. They can test and report bugs, write documentation, maintain infrastructure, help work the mailing lists and answer the easy questions to free up the devels time, contribute storage & bandwidth, cash, etc. Bitching without a willingness to enter the trenches first isn't a positive contribution, but it does appear to generate pageviews.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

He wasn't talking about writing code. He was asking for her to make a specific feature request, not a vague one. There are a lot of ways to contribute.

Let me ask this. Instead of writing that GNOME ignores its users, why not instead hustle up some developers to implement the feature she wanted. A feature was ask for and someone at Gnome said if we can find a developer to implement it, it'll be done. Well, Eugenia has the perfect forum for finding people and maybe she could find some developers to implement it. How about that for contributing.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[nadamsieee]

RTFA! Eugenia did try to DO something about it. She may be the Dvorak of OSNews (I don't know or care), but even a broken clock shows the right time twice a day; IMHO, she nailed this one.

F/OSS must figure out how to add users to the feedback loop if they want to compete. Software nirvana = Free/Open Source + Inclusive/Meaningful User Feedback

Re:Don't feed the troll

[koh]

Yup. And she's not even sexy. And many people say her Slashdot trigger finger is too cranky (no pun intended).

Let's have a (-1, Eugenia) moderation. Hell, let's boycott all stories she submits! Eugenia writes, blah, blah, 0 comments!

Sorry. Been a terrible week.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Haxwell]

If you want it, write it, if you won't write it, STFU

That is the open source way. The way it works is simple. If enough people want something done, they have the freedom to do it. If you can't reach that critical mass of people interested in exercising that freedom to DO SOMETHING to get it done, then it must not be worth doing.

Look at it this way.

1. The code is open. Anybody can do whatever they want with it.
2. There are programmers out there with way more skills than money. Somebody out there can use a job or a project to work on.
3. If there are enough people who really want to see something done in a project, they can pool their money and pay somebody to do it.

And if you can't get enough people together to pay SOMEBODY in this whole world to do it, it must not be worth doing.

Open source is about community. The community is the key in every aspect of it. Creating it, using it, improving it, supporting it, all of it. Open source is also a meritocracy. Nobody owes you, and nobody owes the community, anything.

So yeah, she's entitled to an opinion, but if she's not willing to DO something about it, other than be mad that someone else won't do something about it, then she should STFU.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

She did offer to get her hands dirty and did offer a solution. Read the thread where she offers to write a PHP solution to the problem.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

even a broken clock shows the right time twice a day

It's a stopped clock that shows the right time twice a day (possibly excepting when they change to and from daylight saving time depending on what time it stopped at). A broken clock might not show the time at all.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

just because anyone can go out and buy a can of paint and brushes doesn't mean they can paint the sistine chapel...

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Elwood P Dowd]

So why doesn't she do what she claims to be good at and talk to these unwashed masses of end users she claims to speak for, find out specifically what they are crying out for and make concrete feature requests backed up by these user's problems?

It's a little closer to that than you might think. But the GNOME devs thought the work that she wanted to do would not have been particularly helpful to GNOME, nor effective in addressing her concerns. They told her so, and she disagreed.

She seems to think a web-poll would be a helpful way of doing market research for GNOME, and they don't. I tend to believe them. Even though they're the spatial browser idiots, I'll take their opinion over Eugenia's.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Saxerman]

From TFA:

I was not happy from the answer I got from the Gnome developers: "A feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it."

And then she goes on to rant how Open Source developers need to cater to their users if open source is to 'succeed.' So, apparently Eugenia doesn't really understand how Open Source software development works. It's not a Leia^H^H^H^Hcommittee. All work is voluntary, which means, as the Gnome devel team pointed out, the only work that gets done is work the devel team feels like working on.

The Freedom OSS provides is the freedom to add features you want either by writing them yourself or paying others to do it. You're also free to whine to the devel team about the features you want... and they're free to ignore you. Freedom is like that.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Haxwell]

But if the community around the Sistine Chapel decides that it needs a new coat of paint, they can pool their money and hire a painter.

Not everybody can do everything. But everybody can do something. If all you can do is put in $5 for the cause, then do it. If all you can do is go beg five other people to put $5 in for the cause, then do it. Everybody can do something.

The open source community does not owe anybody anything. If you want something, open source allows you to have it. But it absolutely DOES NOT give you the right to have it given to you.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Zphbeeblbrox]

actually though she was right. You can't claim to be "user centric" and ignore your users. Its a contradiction. On one hand they say they want to be user centric and enterprise ready. On the other they ignore what is necessary to actually be those things. Maybe they don't actually understand what it takes, but refusing to learn it is just plain wrong. Seems like a pride issue to me. "We know what's right and we certainly can't be wrong." No one can learn with that attitude. If you don't want to make the effort to be user centric then don't claim you are. Simple as that.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[dsanfte]

She can 'bitch' all she likes. It's her right. Take your arrogant attitude and leave if you don't like it.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[eyeye]

The mailing lists are amusing. Eugenia also manages to cause problems by trying to get a gnome theme changed but gets the wrong person to change the wrong theme.

She is the class of computer user who has just enough knowledge to be a pest but not enough to be useful.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[ophix]

she accuses the gnome group of the VERY SAME THING she herself does with osnews.com, completely ignore user requests.

users of osnews.com have been requesting minor and major improvements in the site's comment system and it has fallen on deaf ears. she actually goes out of her way to moderate down any such requests sometimes and gets pissy if you point out her own hypocrisy(sp?) hiding behind the mantra of osnews being a free service blah blah blah.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Pentavirate]

She actually did offer to work with the devs to identify the features most requested. She offered to write a php script to take the feature requests from bugzilla and allow people for a period of time to vote for their favorite 3 requests. When she offered to do this work for the devs is when they came back with their infamous statement that the only way a feature will get coded is if a dev wants to do it (ie has a need for it personally).

All of this information is in the second article.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[trynis]

Those who aren't willing to CONTRIBUTE to an Open Source/Free Software project are not entitled to an opinion. But those who do not write code can still contribute. They can test and report bugs, write documentation, maintain infrastructure, help work the mailing lists and answer the easy questions to free up the devels time, contribute storage & bandwidth, cash, etc.

Or they can write a piece that brings the issue out, so other people get aware of the problem.

Bitching without a willingness to enter the trenches first isn't a positive contribution

I think it is, if it's bitching in a way that spurs discussion. Unfortunately, so far it's mostly been a meta discussion here on slashot.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[bonch]

So, apparently Eugenia doesn't really understand how Open Source software development works.

Uh, apparently she does, or else she wouldn't be complaining about it.

Essentially, what you're saying is it's okay if user requests get ignored becuase "that's how OSS works." Well, then don't bitch when someone writes up an article complaining that their requests aren't heard!

Developers want to appear as putting out products that focus on usability, but don't want to deal with the users who are working with their products. Sorry, if you don't want to hear any complaints about your product, keep it on your private network and never release it. Just because it's a volunteer effort doesn't mean squat. Everything is a volunteer effort--it's just that in the commercial world, you also get paid for your work so there's more incentive to stay working.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[drgonzo59]

If the clock is not completely broken but is just way behind and stays that way, it will never show the correct time but the illusion that it is working. Draw the parallel between that and her on your own.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

...wouldn't generate nearly as many pageviews on her website, which is what her job really is; stirring the pot and generating lots of traffic.

LOL. Of course, that would never apply to your beloved slashdot, eh? LMFAO...

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who aren't willing to CONTRIBUTE to an Open Source/Free Software project are not entitled to an opinion.

But isn't giving your honest opinion a CONTRIBUTION to the Open Source/Free Software project?

After all, if you're using it, you're contributing to the success of the project. What good is software that is never used?

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the subject line on the comment you posted.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who aren't willing to CONTRIBUTE to an Open Source/Free Software project are not entitled to an opinion.

And this attitude illustrates in a nutshell exactly why OSS will always be a fringe element. You are exactly what the article was written about.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent insightful!

Re:Don't feed the troll

[EsbenMoseHansen]

feature will get coded is if a dev wants to do it (ie has a need for it personally).

That parenthesized statement does not follow, despite the ie. Case in point: When I'm implementing something, I often pick it from an often requested fix/feature in bugzilla. When I'm in maintainer mode, this is the way I usually do it.

Besides, the offer she did is nearly worthless. Most bugzillas already have voting system, and her results would be as skewed as the results of these. If you want to do more, you need to ask the users that never votes for anything.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Saxerman]

She did offer to get her hands dirty and did offer a solution. Read the thread where she offers to write a PHP solution to the problem.

Yes, but her solution wasn't addressing the real problem. Eugenia sees the problem being that the gnome devel team is only working on the features they want, not the features their users want. But this isn't a 'problem' with OSS, it's a feature. :P

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I seem to remember during one of Eugenia's rants about some interface or another she 'volunteered' to help but only if there was a guarantee that her ideas would be used and, I think, used exclusively. This is a person who wants to snipe from the sidelines, but doesn't want to play on a team.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Uggh. Such articles are the reason I stopped reading OSNews a long time ago.

As a GNOME desktop developer (not directly related to the GNOME project), I try to do my best to help end-users. Often, request (demands) are impossible to meet. I work on a GNOME desktop in my spare time. I have a job (not working on GNOME), school, a relationship. I can't do everything that every single user asks.

Why is Eugenia being "ignored"? Because OSS developers have better things to do. Contrary to her own opinion of OSS, most developers aren't programming these things because they want to give her free software. They're doing it because *they* want a desktop that *they* can use.

Eugenia's problem is that she is impatient and demanding. She always has been. It's not hard for her to criticise any and every project out there, yet offer no real assistance in improving it. Did she create her "PHP voting system"? I didn't see it. She merely cried about the situation on OSNews. What good did that do?

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Saxerman]

Developers want to appear as putting out products that focus on usability, but don't want to deal with the users who are working with their products. Sorry, if you don't want to hear any complaints about your product, keep it on your private network and never release it.

You might be suggesting that by releasing something into the public domain, the owner should continue to support it. And you're right, but seem to ignore one important distinction. Once in the public domain, it's owned by everyone.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[zootm]

My main argument against that is that if they want to make GNOME easy-to-use, their current users aren't the ones they should be listening to. Sad though it sounds.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree completely, this is VERY sad. Eugenia is a troll and her 'editorial' only constitute a cheap intent to make publicity for her site. Do you remember when Eugenia didn't like the excellent Gnomemeeting because it didn't have an "Start AV" icon in her favourite IM program? And what happened after Damien Sandras explained very well to her the difference between something like MSN Messenger 'webcam' feature and the far more powerful Gnomemeeting? She keep telling 'OK, but I want to see the icon in mi GAIM!'. Just analyze the intellectual power of her and what kind of 'suggetions' she can make to GNOME developers.

Just my two cents.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you need to re-read TFA. You are right that Eugenia did try to do something about it. Here's what she did: First, she said she had 20 enhancements and said she wouldn't file them in bugzilla but wanted to know where else to put them where they'd get higher precedence. After being told to use bugzilla, she suggested writing a poll that would be officially sanctioned by Gnome and that then all the developers would go and implement the most requested features from. When she was told that actual market research and field testing was the way to go and that polls are known to have bad sample bias, she started talking about having everyone pay to use Gnome and have the Gnome Foundation split up the money among the developers. Making Gnome not be free software obviously isn't an option.

So yes, she tried to do something. She wanted to change how everything worked and make her way have precedence over everyone else and then whined online when she didn't get her way, portraying things as "Gnome developers don't listen" instead of the truth as "Gnome developers don't do exactly what I want."

If she had gone off and done a poll on OSNews, that would have been great. Personally, I would have read it and incorporated the feedback. But she wasn't willing to help unless it was done exactly her way and that's why people ended up telling her off in the end. She can do great work and be a great help (I personally think gnomefiles rocks, for example), but she seems to be misguided at times...

Elijah

Re:Don't feed the troll

[the_pooh_experience]

You are absolutely correct on all of your points, but misinformed on the thread. First, the offer was to make a php script that allowed users to vote on them, and... well in her own words:

"What about if I write a php engine that lists the 50 or 100 more wanted feature requests as found in Bugzilla (should take me 1-2 days to go through most of them), and then have people vote for them up to three options? This way we would have a poll that's more detailed than current poll engines could handle, and it would draw its options from bugzilla so they are not just irrelevant random stuff. The poll would be open for 1-2 weeks, and then devs could take a look."

Not skewed results from the broken bugzilla voting. Not the mish-mash of random flip desires of rebel users. Three, highly desired features of Gnome.

As for the parenthesized statement, this was not speculation from GP, nor was it speculation from Thom Holwerda nor Eugenia, but rather came out in thread itself.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

But if they are user-oriented as they have publicly stated, they should be interested in some form of user participation you would think. Perhaps one of them could have said "Fine, you implement THIS, Eugenia."

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

> As a GNOME desktop developer (not directly related to the GNOME project).

What a contradiction and this within the first sentence!

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying that GPLed software protected by copyright law like GNOME is actually public domain and not copyrighted at all? Copyrighted software is owned by the copyright holder. Public domain software is not owned.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Enahs]

The funny thing about trolls is that they often make good points.

Hell, I've been told by a Ubuntu and GNOME developer that my opinion doesn't matter because I'm smart enough to operate an IRC client. Huh?

I'm rooting for Kubuntu, BTW. :-)

Re:Don't feed the troll

[ShieldW0lf]

with their infamous statement that the only way a feature will get coded is if a dev wants to do it (ie has a need for it personally).

If you offered me enough money, I'd want to do it. Even if I didn't need it personally. But then, once you'd paid me for it, it would be yours (and everyone elses) forever, not just until I've forced the version you paid me for into obsolescence.

I refuse to use that software, because I respect myself and my choices. I prefer to shed down the right money for the right commercial software (open or closed), than to use half-baked, half-implemented OSS software made by deaf developers.

Rather than throwing a temper tantrum like a 4 year old and buying commercial software just to spite those arrogant bastards that keep giving away what they want to give away instead of what she wants them to give away, perhaps she could show some inititive and set up a system where people could contribute to a "bounty" for features. I'd chuck $5 from my paypal account into a fund for features I want as long as I could pull my money back if they took too long. This woman has a website, she accepts paypal subscriptions, something like this should not be beyond her abilities.

But instead of doing something that will solve the problem, she just wants to bitch. Wow, they weren't interested in surrendering control of what they do in their free time to her and her little voting site. The temerity of the bastards not to jump on her generous offer.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Saxerman]

But if they are user-oriented as they have publicly stated, they should be interested in some form of user participation you would think.

I accept that 'user-oriented' suggests some level of dedication towards the desires of their user base, but this doesn't mean they'll open up the direction of the project to a web poll of features. In OSS it's the wheel that the engineers feel like working on that gets the grease.

Perhaps one of them could have said "Fine, you implement THIS, Eugenia."

Certainly they could have said it, but why? The key here is that OSS projects don't move in any direction without someone pushing. The crowds chanting and jeering along for the ride only have as much effect as the programmers want. And we could argue that they should spend more time listening to the crowd... but why? It's their time, and they're free to do with it as they wish.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[halltk1983]

Chances are they use gnome, and they follow what they want, thus they are user centric... just not centered around the majority of users. :-)

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Rahga]

As seen on OSNews

While you are at it Eugenia, your readers/users want

1). A better comment system for OSnews.

2). Registration based commenting.

3). Support for all XHTML tags (it's freaking 2005!)

4). A better moderation scheme.

5). A user friendly editor with spell checking and automatic tagging.

6). Ability to reply directly to comments with ugly @ in the reply field.

7). Ability to place certain trolls on an ignore list.

8). Ability to edit comments that have already been posted.

Oh and your users have been clamoring for these features for years. Why haven't you implemented them?

Re:Don't feed the troll

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

You're right but I think it's good that this complete lack of user imput was brought to light. Perhaps there will be some action taken now. Meanwhile I uill continue to use KDE and Fluxbox :)

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not read the article? First, it wasn't her or the Slashdot poster who equated "wants to do it" to "need for it personally," it was the Gnome developers in response to her questions. Second. the Gnome developers stated that they intentionally turned off the voting system on their bugzilla because they didn't want to be bothered with what the users wanted.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny. You and lots of others below call her "troll" and "clueless" as well as lots of other names. Nobody bothers to read, see what she actually says and refute it. If it were so clueless, seems like that would be simple to do.

Oh, and if you're going to try, make sure you actually read the article so you can see what she actually said and not what some troll below claimed she said.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[xgamer04]

And if you can't get enough people together to pay SOMEBODY in this whole world to do it, it must not be worth doing.

This is kind of the converse of what you said, but it is wise to remember that Van Gogh never sold a painting in his life.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wah! all the gnome fannboys really got a stick up their asses over this one. The vehemence of people's dismissal is *exactly* the attitude she is talking about!

Characterizing her as being the only person who feels this way really exposes what a thinly vieled defense of ego these rebuttals are since if you read gnomedesktop.org regularly you will see that many people regularly complain about these exact issues. People who use and love gnome but who are not totally delusional, in denial, ass holes (like many gnomers seem to be, sorry but it is just true).

Eugenia gets more grief for everything she does. Constructive criticism + a nice web site + lots of involvement in gnome (more than 99% of the whiners here I'd bet) + gnomefiles.org (really nice site) and she gets nothing but attacks from the people who should be sincerely thanking her.

What gives? Lonely jack-off kings just can't be nice about their own inadequacies? Is this the treatment high profile females get in the lonely OSS geek world?

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

And what's with the DumbTags (tm) "feature", that hrefs terms like "Cell Phone" with dubious pop-up tags like:
"SPONSORED LINK
Discover Windows Mobility Marvels -
Learn how to build mobile
applications for pocket PCs and
Smartphones using .NET technologies.
Attend free Microsoft webcast series now. "

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

"Me explain so caveman understand word!"

I work on packaging a GNOME desktop. I do not develop the core GNOME desktop source code.

Is it all clear now?

Re:Don't feed the troll

[KarmaMB84]

If they claim the user comes first and are ignoring the users, they need to STFU and stop making false claims about users coming first. I'm quite sick of hearing stupid claims about OSS developers wanting to bring OSS software to the desktop when they obviously don't give a shit about making it usable for anyone but themselves.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[KarmaMB84]

This is also why relying on open source or using open source software exclusively is a stupid thing to do.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[eviltypeguy]

There's a difference between having your requests heard and getting your way.

They heard her request, and the declined it. It was heard, it was just rejected.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Taladar]

The problem are mostly the people spending more time talking about open source than developing. They claim the OS-Movement wants 100% market share, not the developers.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[zotz]

"Those who aren't willing to CONTRIBUTE to an Open Source/Free Software project are not entitled to an opinion."

I think you could word/express this better.

Certainly they are entitled to an opinion. It is just that they are dreaming if they think they are entitled to have others take them seriously given that unwillingness. They are also dreaming if they expect to not get trouble for expressing them.

all the best,

drew

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

She's probably doing the same thing everyone else with a clue is, and that's not using gnome. Though most of us just don't use it because it sucks.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

> They heard her request, and the declined it. It was heard, it was just rejected.

She isn't the first and will not be the last person who 'was heard' and then 'just rejected'. Many others happened to have made the same experience before here and many others will follow after her as well.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Dh2000]

Why should we bother? It's obvious they don't care what WE (people who file bug reports, beg for features, or offer constructive criticism) want in Gnome, so there is no point to donate in hopes they will fix stuff that THEY don't care about.

They will just continue adding or removing whatever features they want... and there is no point hiring an outside developer.. the Gnome devs will just ignore any patches they don't feel "belong" in gnome, too.

The only options would be to fork it, or hire yourself a team of patchers. It's just ridiculous. :|

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

> Read the thread where she offers to write a PHP solution to the problem.

Yes, a PHP script for bugzilla, which is written in perl. How, uh, strange.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[zotz]

"Essentially, what you're saying is it's okay if user requests get ignored becuase "that's how OSS works." Well, then don't bitch when someone writes up an article complaining that their requests aren't heard!"

Hey, everyone if free to express themselves, and everyone else is free to ignore them.

Now, if others find what we have to say beneficial, perhaps we wont be ignored.

all the best,

drew

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Too Much Noise]

Those who aren't willing to CONTRIBUTE to an Open Source/Free Software project are not entitled to an opinion.

Assuming you're not as dense as this statement makes you appear, here's what's wrong with this particular bit:

• EVERYONE is entitled to an opinion.
  
• The value of an opinion is not directly related to the contributing/non-contributing status of the person emitting it (a.k.a. contributors do not hold a monopoly on truth)
  
• No matter the value of the opinion, there is no guarantee of it being taken into account other people, such as developers (a.k.a. "reasonable expectation" != "certainty")
  
• If you want to split hairs, an opinion IS a contribution, even if not always a positive one.
  

They can test and report bugs ...

Technically, this is what she did - report a bug in the feedback system (effect of feature requests, voting and so on) Unless you want to uphold the idea that user feedback is irrelevant to F/OSS or that for some reason "user feedback" changes meaning when applied to F/OSS, in which case I apologize for attempting to argue with you.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[JPriest]

She does make specific feature requests. I think she was pointing out that hers and other "feature requests" are mostly like talking to the wall. Please don't draw conclusions from 1/4 of the story.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad the article is about open source software, not public domain software.

No open source software is released to the public domain. OSS is licensed. The original author generally remains the copyright holder unless they've assigned their rights to someone else (eg, the FSF). Public domain software is truly in the public domain. You can do whatever you want with it. There is no license because their is no owner.

So your argument isn't a very effective one for saying that it's everyone's responsibility to support the code. It is also more applicable to something under the BSD license than the GPL or LGPL licenses.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Ogerman]

And then she goes on to rant how Open Source developers need to cater to their users if open source is to 'succeed.'

Open Source projects need to cater to users if they are to succeed beyond a small group of developers and enthusiasts. There's nothing wrong with saying this because OSS history has proven it time and time again. I'm not saying that all projects must cater to all users. Furthermore, I'm not saying that all user demands are valid. However, diligent research into common, legitimate user demands will, in fact, make a project more popular. This benefits everyone since popularity usually also translates into more developers and ideally some sort of funding.

So, apparently Eugenia doesn't really understand how Open Source software development works. It's not a Leia^H^H^H^Hcommittee.

There's no one way that "OSS development works." Some projects are, in fact, run by an efficient committee and it works out well for them. Others completely lack centralized leadership. There are pros and cons to both. I'm not sure what the "Leia" reference was.. I hope that's not a jab at her gender. If anything, women should be offered more technical coordinator and user-liaison roles in OSS projects because these fit their well with their natural strengths. (Yes, I know there are good women programmers too. The point is that women are often superior to men in dealing with a flood of information and personal interactions.)

All work is voluntary, which means, as the Gnome devel team pointed out, the only work that gets done is work the devel team feels like working on.

All work does not need to be voluntary. If users care enough, they can raise money to pay the developers to add whatever features they want. Commercialization, not pure volunteerism, is the future of OSS. I'm not talking about huge companies or struggles for control; I'm talking about an efficient exchange between users and developers -- both intellectually and financially. Developers need to realize that the best way to take their projects to the next level is to begin commercializing them -- to treat their hobby partly as a small business. The day when most developers are being paid to write OSS full time is the day when the Open Source movement can be declared a complete success. It is my concern that too many projects today function as small island economies. Nobody has questioned the ability of impassioned developers to meet their own needs. The question is whether their passion and creative resource can be effectively used to transform a world in dire need. We, Open Source community at large, need to broaden our horizons.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I love your idea. I also respect the opinions of the parent. I think both your statements are valid. Personally as a user of OSS, I was disappointed with the direction gnome took after v1.4. I'm a KDE user now, and I probably wouldn't mind kicking them a few bucks to keep up the good work. As far as gnome goes, the devs are entitled to take that attitude. More power to them and best wishes that they fulfill their ends and scratch there itch. I'm happy on KDE so anything they do that benefits me is double plus good. But if they actively shun and ignore their users, that may just give KDE more fuel to burn brighter. Who knows. Anyways....

Re:Don't feed the troll

[QuantumG]

Don't forget that some people actually get paid to work on GNOME.. these people are happy to work on the feature requests of customers as it encourages those customers to buy the next release of the product. Of course, Eugenia isn't actually a paying customer of any of the companies that pay those developers, she wants people to work on her feature requests for free, even if they have no interest in them.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Trifthen]

While there is definitely a "trollish" feel to all of this, I'm not so sure it's that simple. The thing is, if there really is a dearth of missing functionality, users will eventually get fed up with it, and fork the source. We all saw this happen with xF86 vs. xOrg.

If you ignore the ranting, it comes down to this: do the developers really want to encourage forking which may wrench the entire project out of their control, so far as relevance is concerned? Really, she's giving them a chance to cut this off before it reaches that point. While the level of loyalty seen here for the core developers is encouraging, reacting to the tone of her message ignores the issue.

Just because someone is being an ass, doesn't mean they're wrong.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if this is the solution (used in some places)...

You have a feature you want implimented, but you don't have the skills to code it yourself.

I suggest that next to the feature request a 'donation amount' field could be included, where you could indicate how much you would donate to the person who codes the request. The money could be paid via PayPal (or someone else more reputable), kept in trust by sourceforge, and paid out when the feature is coded. That way, popular requests would have many people putting money in to see them implimented, and there would be some incentive for a coder to impliment a (perhaps boring) but usefull tool.

At least that is better than people bitching when other people dont code what they want on ***free*** software...

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

9). OSNews to stop publish embarrassing Amiga, Inc. advertising and lies from their single remaining fanboy Mike Bouma.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[agrippa_cash]

I often thought that a OSS bounty site would be good. People could pay $20 (to avoid the micropayment % problem), then distribute the money in $1 or $5 towards features and programs they they wanted implimented. The problem is who manages each project, and how long feature can take etc. Hopefully someone with management skills will read this and solve the problem. Depending on the lead time for project completion, it could even make a little money on the interest from peoples $20.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

That's true. I once suggested that the titles of pages contain the titles of articles instead of just the static string "OSNews.com - Exploring the Future of Computing". Her answer was something along the line of: "it's difficult because of the template system blah blah blah." Please! How hard is it really? Either she is too lazy, doesn't accept criticism at all, or a complete idiot.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Jason Earl]

The Gnome users are not ignoring users. They are simply ignoring the sort of users that post to the Gnome development mailing lists and that know what "bugzilla" is.

Here's the thing. When Gnome first was started it was written by hackers for hackers. The Window Manager was scriptable is lisp, for crying out loud, and the desktop had a hojillion configurable widgets.

When the Gnome hackers tried to sell this desktop to actual end users they quickly found that the "right" amount of complexity for hackers was "way too much" complexity for normal users. Since that time Gnome has been all about simplification. Personally, I think that they are doing a pretty darn good job. I miss some of the chrome from earlier versions of Gnome, but my wife can use it now.

In a sense Gnome *has* stopped listening to its users. Gnome is no longer targeting the typical Linux hacker, but instead it is targeting "normal" computer users. You don't find out what normal users want from bugzilla or from a mailing list. Instead you try and sell them some software and you see what kind of feedback you get.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[mrmeval]

Gnome sucks

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Ogerman]

Those who aren't willing to CONTRIBUTE to an Open Source/Free Software project are not entitled to an opinion. But those who do not write code can still contribute. They can test and report bugs, write documentation, maintain infrastructure, help work the mailing lists and answer the easy questions to free up the devels time, contribute storage & bandwidth, cash, etc.

If you'd read her editorials, you would have noticed that she does most of those things you just listed as contribution. And not only that but the suggestion you made at the beginning was precisely what she was trying to do -- talk to users, learn where they suffer, and be an interface between end users and devels. She was trying to do some "marketing" to help out a project she likes and wants to see improve for the benefit of all.

Now, I don't know anything about this woman's past commentary or interaction with developers, but regardless, she does make some valid points in her editorial that need to be heeded (minus a few overly harsh criticisms..) Unfortunately, Slashdot editors had to give this article an inflamatory headline, so everyone immediately went into this discussion as a flamewar and, as usual, didn't read the original content.

One of her paragraphs sums up her overall point best and is worth reading whether or not you go back and read the whole article:

[snip]
What I like to see, is some market research. Approach all kinds of users, put their gripes in line, make a note of their features they really need and evaluate them. Then, create a project plan and distribute the tasks that need to be done to your developers and make sure they deliver what they must deliver. People will say "that's not how OSS works", but as a user, I don't really care how OSS works. I care about using software that's been properly developed taking users into account rather than purely developers' needs. Be careful: I am not asking the OSS developers to implement every little thing that's asked out there, I am asking them to simply take users into account and get an idea of what the whole of their userbase needs. Extracting useful information from the mass will be difficult, but it is achievable if the right resources & infrastructure are into place.
[/snip]

Now what, precisely, is so horribly wrong with this proposal, fellow Slashdotters? This is how large Open Source projects should be run. Users absolutely must be the focus. Her idea of setting up an infrastructure to allow masses of ordinary users to produce feedback is an excellent idea. And no, this is not covered by existing Bugzilla because it requires registration and too much knowledge and formality.

As an Open Source developer myself, I hold the following philosophy when it comes to the use of my free time: "Because I am sacrificing a great deal of my time, I must evaluate its use. My time is highly valuable and I could be readily making money instead. If I'm going to freely spend some of this time for OSS, it should be spent in a way that helps the most people. After all, if I didn't care, I would just run Windows and stick with my day job -- that's the easy way out. Instead I desire to help people and advance technological freedom in our society by providing superior alternatives to proprietary software. The only way for this to happen is for me to listen to what my users want and weigh this heavily in my decision making. Sometimes they are flat wrong. Other times their ideas are brilliant. Regardless, if I don't listen, I will not produce quality software because it will only meet my own needs and/or the inaccurate perceived needs of my userbase. If I do listen to my users, my project will someday be popular enough that I can make money through support and paid enhancements. I don't wish to become rich, but I would like to make a living while doing what I love. If I could work full time on OSS, it would be beneficial to my userbase. My ultimate dream is to see OSS dominate computing for the benefit of all -- even those who today are the enemies of our ideals. Everyone in the OSS community must play their part, do their best, hold the right attitudes, and keep the big picture in mind."

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Jason Earl]

Yeah, Eugenia offered to script a voting system on top of bugzilla. That would be great if you wanted to get the opinions of the sort of people that use bugzilla. If Gnome wants to end up with an interface like Emacs that's the way to go. Ask a bunch of hackers what they want Gnome to do and you'll get the sort of lisp-scripted, readline supporting, stuff that Gnome 1 was made of. Gnome wants feedback from CIOs and you grandma, not from Eugenia. They certainly don't want to give folks like Eugenia the power to choose what features should or should not get developed just because she whipped up a PHP script.

Gnome is currently getting user feedback the same way that Microsoft gets user feedback. Salesfolks from Novell, Sun, Red Hat, and even IBM go out and talk to customers about what it would take to get them to switch to Linux. Then these salefolks come back and give the hackers their marching orders. That's why successive versions of Gnome have been more about removing features than adding them. The problem with Gnome wasn't that it was lacking features. The problem was that it was too complex.

The advantage that Gnome has over Microsoft is that individual hackers that are enthused about a particular idea can get involved directly. Sometimes this works out well, other times it doesn't, but either way progress is made.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Jason Earl]

Yes, and that would be great if the Gnome hackers believed that the perfect target for Gnome is people who hang out on technology websites, know how to post to bugzilla, or email Gnome development lists.

Guess what, Gnome hackers already listened to those people. That's why Gnome 1 featured a window manager that was scriptable in a lisp variant and a file chooser dialog whose only redeeming feature was that it allowed for tab completion of filenames a la bash and readline. In short, Gnome 1 was a hackers paradise.

The problem was that when the Gnome hackers tried to sell this desktop companies laughed them right out of the room.

So now Gnome is all about simplification. Gnome hackers are building something that the sales departments in their various companies can sell to actual people. Gnome hackers get their end user feedback not from web forms or mailing lists, but from actual users.

Eugenia's solution wouldn't have solved any problem because the "problem" isn't a lack of information. The Gnome hackers know precisely what they are doing. What they are doing is building a desktop that your grandma can use, and that means far less features than the chrome-filled Gnome of yesterday.

Gnome hackers are more than interested in listening to end users, but they aren't interested in listening to end users like Eugenia.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

> Here's the thing. When Gnome first was started it
> was written by hackers for hackers.

Yeah and you are the person who KNOWS what happened 'first'. I bet you are some sort of asshole who started to participate to open source for the past say 1-2 years maybe ? Or will I get some reply as if you participate longer ? Anyways I've been with GNOME since the beginnings and the intention and aim behind it was quite obvious.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

> The problem was that when the Gnome hackers tried
> to sell this desktop companies laughed them right
> out of the room.

Looks like companies still laugh their tail off of them.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

> That's why successive versions of Gnome have been
> more about removing features than adding them. The
> problem with Gnome wasn't that it was lacking
> features. The problem was that it was too complex.

How contradicting. A not so complex Desktop ontop of a totaly complex operating system. Where you need to do 429085243752935345 console actions to get stuff sorted out cleanly.. Grow up asshole, your technobabbel doesn't stand one second.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

That's perfectly true though. Nothing in OSS will ever get done for free if a dev doesn't have an interest in it. We're doing this for free, for fun.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[chefren]

You're right. Having devs implement stuff the donät want and not getting paid for it is more like slave labour than oss development. What needs to be done is teach more devs to want to implement popular requests. This kind of flaming doesn't do that.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[EsbenMoseHansen]

First, the offer was to make a php script that allowed users to vote on them, and... well in her own words:

I don't doubt that the offer was made with the best intentions. However, why not use bugzilla's vote mechanism? Gnome doesn't use them, it seems, but KDE has Most wanted bugs. I don't know why you think bugzilla's voting system is broken, so I won't comment on that.

When I said the result are skewed I meant that the population is smaller, and different, from the Gnome user population at large. This is true for the bugzilla votes, and this would be true for a website poll. This might be why the Gnome people have disabled votes, though I don't know.

As for the parenthesized statement, this was not speculation from GP, nor was it speculation from Thom Holwerda nor Eugenia, but rather came out in thread itself.

It is, in any case, a common misconception that I take offense at. Certainly, any support requested by someone expressing that view would go to the very bottom of my todo list. Developers are not, as a rule, selfless bastards. But usually our priorities differs from someone else, and thus the moaning and bitching (like the parenthesized statement) ensues.

The Gnome people have made an excellent beginner's desktop. They should be applauded. Why not encourage rather than complain? Honey works better than vinegar, usually.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Eugenia is entitled to say whatever she'd like to say. As an objective observer, I think that Gnome has lost a lot of it's influence and marketplace in the OSS world. It is far faster than KDE but lacks a great deal of functionality that KDE provides. It's for that reason that the feature and eye candy crowd is moving to KDE. And for those who don't WANT a desktop manager with all the bells and whistles, or even don't want a desktop manager at all and would rather just run a small window manager, they go with something less consuming like wmaker, *box, etc. Gnome has a longer development cycle and is loosing it's popularity. OSS software as 98% of slashdot readers know, is, in the big picture, influenced by usage, the more people that use it, the faster and more effectively it improves. But zooming from the big overview into the individual: Eugenia doesn't seem to get the picture. It's not THEM making the PRODUCT. It's us making what we want. There isn't a CEO of Gnome development that dictates what feature is added and which isn't - there isn't in almost any OSS project. The idea behind OSS is that Eugenia wants feature X so Eugenia writes feature X into the program and submits her code... then everyone has what Eugenia wanted. She can complain about it all she wants but it's falling on deaf ears. If she wants the feature, she should write it... and even if her code sucks, it WILL evolve from there into something useful for all.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[cowbutt]

So if you are not writing code of OSS then you are not entitled to an opinion? Also, she does contribute to things like look/feel/UI design etc.

Almost; I'd say there are about three scenarios where J. Random User's opinion counts for anything:

They're also a developer and submit a suitably tasteful patch (and maintain it until it is accepted into the upstream package) to add the desired functionality.

They're a customer of a vendor (this could include Debian, of course, in which case no money need change hands). By petitioning the vendor, the vendor can develop the feature or lobby developers on their behalf if the user's request is in alignment with the vendor's goals.

Depending on the developer, a well thought-out description (i.e. including a description of how to handle odd corner cases and any compatibility issues with the existing implementation, at the very least) may be enough to convince an altruistic developer to implement it.

I find the first of these options works best for me.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[newentiti]

>they came back with their infamous statement that >the only way a feature will get coded is if a dev >wants to do it (ie has a need for it personally).

>All of this information is in the second article.

Nowhere in the second article is there any "infamous" statement that a coder will only code something if he "has a need for it personally".

What you'll find is a statement that "A feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it, regardless of the number of votes it's recieved"

So if you believe that the developers of Gnome are hired from you or anybody else then you believe wrong.

If you believe that democracy is to be able to force an individual to work in order to build something that the majority likes no matter what he thinks then you believe wrong.

(disclaimer I am just a user - I have never developed anything realy important for the rest of the world and I don't expect anybody to be "oblidged by God or the Rules Of The Good Programmer or What_Ever" to do anything similar for me)

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

bingo bango!

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Sumocide]

Where's your market research to back this up?

Re:Don't feed the troll

[takis]

Well, then don't bitch when someone writes up an article complaining that their requests aren't heard!

It's Eugenia who's bitching about the lack of developers writing software -they don't need or like themselves- for free for other people.

Sorry, if you don't want to hear any complaints about your product, keep it on your private network and never release it. Just because it's a volunteer effort doesn't mean squat.

No, I prefer the software being released just as it is. If I like, I'll use it, if I don't like it, I will STFU.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[m50d]

Why am I down as a troll? For saying there is a lot of trolling on slashdot? Because there is, just read at -1 for a day, and then compare it to what you see on practically any other site.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[mysticwhiskey]

I have just one thing to say: Well put.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[AaronLawrence]

Quite so. But in fact there are *different groups* of OSS developers. Some quite earnestly do want to bring software to all users. Some others only write good things that they want. "Coincidentally" the number of highly productive developers doing the latter is more than the former.
Another great thing about OSS is that it tends to be written BY the users. That is, just about any field will have some users who are also developers, who can start work on some software that can grow. They WILL have a good idea about what "users" want because they are users themselves.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[AaronLawrence]

Really? You are a great person! But alot of open source developers are not like that, or not like that most of the time. Their motivations are a) to solve their own problems b) to solve interesting problems and perhaps c) interact in an interesting development community.
I do some free/open source software and my motivations are some combination of those.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

> Rather than throwing a temper tantrum like a 4 year old and buying commercial software just to spite those arrogant bastards that keep giving away what they want to give away instead of what she wants them to give away, perhaps she could show some inititive and set up a system where people could contribute to a "bounty" for features. I'd chuck $5 from my paypal account into a fund for features I want as long as I could pull my money back if they took too long.

Yeah, right - you guys live in a fantasy world. Nobody's gonna pay (well, apparently, other than you) for all of these tools - the whole idea is that they're free. Start charging for them and guess what - it's back to Micro$oft. This is a classic example of the clueless do-gooder attitude.

>But instead of doing something that will solve the problem, she just wants to bitch. Wow, they weren't interested in surrendering control of what they do in their free time to her and her little voting site. The temerity of the bastards not to jump on her generous offer.

While I'm the first to get annoyed by excessive bitching, sometimes there is a need for bitching. It seems that you guys are assuming bitching is not allowed. This is more BS, and a wrong assumption.

The way I see it, GNOME has some clout and it has gone to their heads. "I'm a big GNOME developer." Keep saying that, assholes, and users will stop using your POS WM since you won't include features they request in them. Only include features you (the developer) want? Thanks, but no thanks. Go count matches or something in your spare time instead of going on a power trip and trying to (unsuccessfully) force your view of what we should use on us.

You're all a bunch of assholes for suggesting this BS. Sometimes it helps to call something what it is instead of writing pages upon pages about it which only FUDs the issue. The problem is that the developers won't listen to what the[ir] users want. That's it. I, for one, am gonna do something about it - I will remove GNOME from my computer, as if it were a virus.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who was himself once trolled by Eugenia regarding the GUI of my app I wholeheartedly second that opinion. Her suggestions really do suck ass. I certainly do not claim to be a great GUI designer but her design was absolute crap and her mails were arrogant as hell.

I guess as everywhere else in life, it's: "Those who can, do; those who can't, criticize (and troll)." IMHO Eugenia falls firmly into the second category...

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Ogerman]

I can understand that not everyone has the same "lets band together and change the world" zeal and I'm not saying this is a requirement for OSS developers or anything like that. On the other hand, there is much at stake for everyone involved. Lets put it this way: all of our lives would be better if OSS dominated the industry. It would make our day jobs much more enjoyable. Even from a purely selfish perspective, I would pursue user-focused OSS for this reason. I don't want OSS to just be an intellectual hobby that I pursue in relative isolation from the "real world" of computing. I want to do this stuff for a living because I enjoy it more. Regardless of politics, I think this is a common desire that we can all agree upon. If we can agree, then I think that we need to use this as impetus to broaden our horizons and think strategically about how we can cause OSS to dominate, not just provide a niche alternative.

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of fuzzy logic do you operate under ?

Lets say I've got an open source project, and I release it:

1. It's mine.
2. It's mine.
3. It's mine.
4. I never promised you anything.

Now YOU come and download MY project. Just because I put it online. And suddenly you're supposed to be telling me what I should do with MY project?

Come on.

It is my choice if I want to listen to you, or even give you a line of communication.

Alot of times, the feedback is helpful, and alot of people contribute very good bugreports and alot of other things. Generally, people are very nice, and help out.

You should just go away.

How did his comment become 5/Insightful ?

Vidar Braut Haarr
http://www.q1n.org/

Re:Don't feed the troll

[Apro im]

The thing is, from my personal experience, GNOME isn't ignoreing the users who are capable or willing to do a fork - they'll take patches, but they ignore feature requests from end-users who can't code, even if they're feasible and make sense.

booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[the_2nd_coming]

I can't feel like a geek if other people can use it!!!

they took the Linux instal away from me... now they are taking GNOME away as well!!!

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[Dana P'Simer]

I give you the geeky linux install back: here

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[Mr2cents]

Don't panic, there will allways be vi, my friend..

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[Curtman]

I give you the geeky linux install back

And they take it away.

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe what you mean to say was: here

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[pmazer]

This just in: vi is dead due to unpopularity and inability to listen to it's userbase

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[Laebshade]

The difficultness is overstated, if you just RTFA. Really. I setup a Gentoo router over my week-day weekend (Tues-Thur). The hardest part was loading the correct driver for one of my NICs (I have two mobos, A7N8X-E Deluxe and A7N8X Deluxe (rev 2.0)). The problem with that was I was loading the right driver, but for the wrong mobo (was loading sk98lin which is for the A7N8X-E Deluxe instead of 3c59x for the A7N8X Deluxe). I spent 3 hours trying to figure out what I did wrong. After that, it's simply a matter of following the easy-to-read Gentoo handbook, sysadmin guides (which guided me through how to set up the actual router), and Gentoo wiki.

What helped me best in setting it up is after having sshd running so I could ssh into the server from my main PC. Have that running in putty on one side of the screen (or another screen if you have 2 monitors) and the handbook on the other, it was dead easy.

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[B3ryllium]

I second that. :)

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[Cylix]

Nah,

Vi/Vim is a cake walk and it's not something you can avoid.

Every system you will run into usually has vi on it and the day you will run into some old sun boxen from hell. That box that has been shut away from the world for five years just lying in wait to test your soul... you will thank yourself for learning vi.

In any event, how else are you going to edit the makefile to get nano/pico to compile.

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[Billly Gates]

Wont work. For one all the commands will be trying to execute at once before the other is finished.

Unless I am wrong?

I was just thinking about this the other day. I want to write a script that would mount my ntfs flashdrive and sync data from a directory. Problem is as I thought of a way to do this is that I need the script to wait while finishing a certain task.

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

You are wrong.

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[B3ryllium]

You are wrong, as the above AC noted. The "&&" is a logical AND operator - each command executes, finishes, and then based on the exit code, the shell decides whether to execute the next one or stop executing them altogether.

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The new Debian Installer dumps you to nano to set up your sources.list. I usually end up with a line full of "j" before I figure out what's wrong =)

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

haha ... i'd like to see how env-update gets executed there :)

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[Billly Gates]

Wicked!

Thanks. That is very helpfull.

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[the_2nd_coming]

other than the fact that you know shit about scripts, why the hell would you format a pen drive with ntfs?

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[njh]

As my collegue pointed out, this does not work because of the chroot line. It's a good joke though :)

(of course Ubuntu doesn't even require a command line)

Re:booo... not user unfreindly enough!!!!

[the_2nd_coming]

you are a complete idiot. fat32 is readable by Linux, Mac OS X, Mac Classic, Solaris, etc.

floppy disks are formated as Fat. flash MP3 players are flash.

Linux has had Fat read/write since back in the mid 90's.

NTFS is the file system that has just recently gotten SOME functionality under Linux.

how to get users

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps if GNOME put a bunch of *COLOR* in their docs their users would be more responsive.

Obligatory comment

[Mad Merlin]

Well we all know the KDE vs Gnome flamewar is coming, lets get it over with as quickly as possible.

Re:Obligatory comment

[Taladar]

Yeah, they are both crap.

(as in too big, too slow, too much like Windows, too inefficient to work in,...)

Re:Obligatory comment

[ErichTheWebGuy]

You only say that cuz you know Gnome sucks! :) *ducks*

Re:Obligatory comment

[jmorris42]

> (as in too big, too slow, too much like Windows, too inefficient to work in,...

I hear ya. GNOME is hellbent on cloning Windows internals while 'innovating' the look & feel (ignoring the whole spatial nautilus fiasco) while KDE is hellbent on cloning the look & feel of Windows while pushing new innovative internals, even if tied to C++ a little too tightly for my taste.

Why can't we get them to swap their bad halves with each other and have a desktop pushing innovative internals AND new ideas in appearance while the other effort focuses on cloning Windows inside and out atop a *NIX base.... Call it OS W. (ducking)

Re:Obligatory comment

[a_karbon_devel_005]

"...GNOME is hellbent on cloning Windows internals while 'innovating' the look & feel (ignoring the whole spatial nautilus fiasco)..."

If by "innovating" you mean "ripping off OSX", then I agree...

Re:Obligatory comment

[bonch]

Why can't we get them to swap their bad halves with each other and have a desktop pushing innovative internals AND new ideas in appearance while the other effort focuses on cloning Windows inside and out atop a *NIX base....

Because KDE and GNOME are obsessed with chasing Microsoft's tail. "You have a taskbar? Well, our taskbar can have multiple panels and applets and be moved anywhere and have endless buttons! You have a start menu? Well, our start menu can be moved anywhere and have endless items and be completely configurable!"

Nobody wants to speak up and say, "Wait a minute--taskbars and start menus SUCK as an interface to begin with..."

Re:Obligatory comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a minute--taskbars and start menus SUCK as an interface to begin with...

Why do you say that? I think they work good for what they do.

I've been using computers since before there was a GUI and the taskbar/start menu is a good thing.

Yes, I use OS X every day, and I still think it sucks because it doesn't have a real taskbar or start menu.

Re:Obligatory comment

[Anonymous Coward]

eh, more than that.

GNOME sucks, KDE sucks, Windows sucks, OS X sucks.

I don't think a decent desktop evironment exists. Just like there is no decent OS, no decent programming language.

Meh, I've used just about everything that exists (including mainframe stuff and everything in between) we're all using crap. And I mean that seriously.

Re:Obligatory comment

[Penguinshit]

You'd rather go back to punch-cards?

Having once had the temerity to say many years ago "who the hell needs a graphical user interface?" I can safely say that a taskbar and a start menu is an excellent interface and a way to keep your desktops tidy.

Re:Obligatory comment

[iostream_dot_h]

GNOME sucks, KDE sucks, Windows sucks, OS X sucks. I don't think a decent desktop evironment exists. Just like there is no decent OS, no decent programming language. Meh, I've used just about everything that exists (including mainframe stuff and everything in between) we're all using crap. And I mean that seriously.

What should a good desktop environment be like? What would you prefer?

If you say everything is crap (and you claim to have seen everything), I wonder what your conception of "good" really is? And if everything is crap, how can you make judgments of what is good and bad if you haven't experienced any good desktop environments? What is your point of reference?

If your standard is perfection, you're not going to get it. Computing is about compromise because no one system fits the needs of everyone. You're not helping the quality of discussion at /., and you're hindering your ability to make reasonable judgments. So, for your own personal satisfaction, and for the sake of discoursive quality, you should change your standards because they are fundamentally untenable.

On a separate note, I think GNOME is improving significantly. It's getting lighter and more efficient, and while there is still a significant amount of bloat, it's improving. Keep up the good work!

Re:Obligatory comment

[Klivian]

>even if tied to C++ a little too tightly for my taste. And still they have more up to date and complete bindings to other languages than the competition. Damn C++ tie.

Re:Obligatory comment

[Anonymous Coward]

If you say everything is crap (and you claim to have seen everything), I wonder what your conception of "good" really is? And if everything is crap, how can you make judgments of what is good and bad if you haven't experienced any good desktop environments? What is your point of reference?

My conception of something decent would take all the good parts from everywhere and put them in one place. It does not need to be perfect.

So if we could take the good parts of Windows, combined with the good from OS X, with the good from GNOME, KDE, etc., and put them into a new desktop evironment then we might have something decent to work off of and improve.

My point of reference is everything currently available.

If your standard is perfection, you're not going to get it. Computing is about compromise because no one system fits the needs of everyone. You're not helping the quality of discussion at /., and you're hindering your ability to make reasonable judgments. So, for your own personal satisfaction, and for the sake of discoursive quality, you should change your standards because they are fundamentally untenable.

I never said perfection was my goal. As you said, that's simply impossible. That would be like trying to create the perfect song or something; it's just not possible.

Re:Obligatory comment

[Anonymous Coward]

You had punch cards? You whipper snapper! In my day we programmed in 1s! 0s weren't invented yet! Sheesh... it's so easy today.

Everyone needs a good whipping, I tell you.

Re:Obligatory comment

[thsths]

> GNOME is hellbent on cloning Windows internals while 'innovating' the look & feel

Yes, it feals like that. Hate the "registry", every once in a while it will screw up, and you have to kill processes, delete lock files etc before any gnome application can start.

And than there are the common dialogs. You know, "Do you really want to quit without saving?", or the file selecter. They keep changing them around, but they never seem to get it right. I would put up with it, if they where at least consistent...

> while KDE is hellbent on cloning the look & feel of Windows while pushing new innovative internals

Which is probably a smart move. An open source project does not have the resources in "UI research" that MS has. So if MS software did actually work, I think it would be quite useable. Luckily, KDE also integrates ideas from MAC OS X, which are sometimes brilliant.

Fork Gnome!

[the_skywise]

If you don't like it!

I mean, isn't that one of the selling points of OSS?

If Gnome wants to be that "closed" to its users, the users are free to fork the build, switch to KDE or build their own from scratch.

(Granted it's not very PRACTICAL, but what are you going to do? Sue them for breach of contract? It's FREE!!!!)

Re:Fork Gnome!

[winkydink]

Did you RTFA? Most end-users are not sw developers.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Taladar]

And those that are not must either find a developer who has sufficiently similar interests or must pay one, what is so difficult to understand about it?

Re:Fork Gnome!

[prsnmn]

There is a difference between users and developers. Regular users can't fork it. They don't even know what CVS is. Gnome needs to cater to users who don't know the first thing about what's under the hood. It needs to just work. That's still one of the reasons that Linux hasn't dented the desktop market.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[winkydink]

Not a thing if you're content with Microsoft's current market share.

If you're in the "OSS will rule the world" crowd, you need to understand that in order to succeed, you will need to adapt to what users want, not the other way around.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome isn't a window manager.

Regardless, what makes it buggy?

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Leo McGarry]

I mean, isn't that one of the selling points of OSS?

"If you don't like it, fuck off?" No, I'm gonna go ahead and say that that should not be one of the selling points of this thing you're pitching.

I'm thinking that "We listen to our customers, and while we're not perfect, we never stop trying to be" would be a good selling point.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[lewp]

"If you don't like it, fuck off, take the code with you, do whatever you want to it, and turn it into whatever you want. Heck, take our code, build a service around it, and charge money for it. Just don't expect us to fall all over ourselves to implement things you want (yeah, because commercial software developers do that... hahaha) for free, and (in some cases) share your (probably trivial) modifications to our millions of lines of code with the world that gave you said code in the first place."

Those open source assholes!

Re:Fork Gnome!

[telbij]

One thing that bothers me about the article is that it's all predicated on the assumption that Gnome developers' primary goal is to have everyone and their mother use Gnome. Even if that were true it only half makes sense to go and implement every feature users want... the fact is that small features do not make a big difference on what software people choose. and extra features may complicate a software product.

I agree that developers of general purpose software should listen to user feedback and combine that with usability testing and time-tested principles of UI design, but that's a no-brainer. Frankly if there's problems in this area, it goes much deeper than not listening to a few feature requests.

This situation just looks like open source groupies demanding that they get everything they want for free. Well I have news for people with this attitude: contributors to open source are still doing a public service even if they aren't your personal code-whore. If you want a feature in an open source product you have two guaranteed options of getting the feature: learn how to do it yourself or pay someone to do it. That's exactly two more options than you get with proprietary software where all you can do is request a feature and hope for the best.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[thm76]

> Gnome needs to cater to users who don't know the first thing about what's under the hood.

Gnome doesn't have to do anything. If users don't like Gnome they can use something else.
If they want features they can try to convince the developers that the requested feature is desireable, implement it themselves or at least make it easier for the developers to understand what they want and how they want it by creating a functional spec.

> It needs to just work.

Well, for me, it does.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[jedidiah]

Why? It worked SO WELL for Microsoft. ...and it failed so miserably for Apple.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Anonymous Coward]

"If Gnome wants to be that "closed" to its users, the users are free to fork the build, switch to KDE or build their own from scratch.
"

Wouldn't it be nice if Gnome had some sort of motivation to keep the users' needs in mind? Perhaps if they charged for the software, maybe the thought of encouraging more people to send them money would cause them to be more attentive to the needs of the majority?

Re:Fork Gnome!

[winkydink]

Apple offered no choice in hw vendor. Customers obviously wanted one.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Taladar]

One might add that the insane size of the gnome and kde projects makes forking difficult even for developers.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Leo McGarry]

As proud as you are of that, you seem to have missed the fact that everybody stopped listening at "If you don't like it, fuck off."

And incidentally, yes, commercial software vendors do fall all over themselves to implement things you want. You just have to offer them money first. See, that's reason #1 why commercial software is nearly always a better business choice than public-domain software. With commercial vendors, you have leverage. You can get them to do things by offering them money, or by threatening to withhold money.

With the developers of public-domain software, you've got no options at all, other than hiring your own staff to bring the whole project in hours, which takes what should be a modest capital expense and turns it into a massive operating expense. Dumb idea all around.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[NoData]

Woah, woah woah! Wait a MINUTE. I know DAMN well what CVS is. It's where I get my drugz, man.

[mutter mutter call me stupid]

-End User.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Anonymous Coward]

With the developers of public-domain software, you've got no options at all, other than hiring your own staff to bring the whole project in hours, which takes what should be a modest capital expense and turns it into a massive operating expense. Dumb idea all around.

Unless the software does what you need, then everything is magical.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Anonymous Coward]

As proud as you are of that, you seem to have missed the fact that everybody stopped listening at "If you don't like it, fuck off."


Everyone except you of course :P

Re:Fork Gnome!

[lewp]

Are you really that stupid?

Companies can (and, believe it or not, do) offer open source code, too. Show up with a check, watch your feature get implemented. Even better, you're not fucked if a vendor isn't cooperative.

You want a feature added to a Microsoft product? Go see Microsoft with a checkbook. If they don't want to do it, or they want too much money, you can either suck it up or pay someone to reimplement whatever piece of software you need (with the feature you want) from scratch.

You want a feature added to GNOME or any other open source product? Take that same checkbook and go see Red Hat. If they're unresponsive, go see SuSE, Mandrake, or one of the lead developers for the product in question. In fact, take bids on the feature you want from all interested parties and get an even lower price. No matter who does it they won't have to reinvent the wheel. If all else fails, and everyone in the world decides they don't like money anymore, you can still implement the feature yourself without having to start from scratch.

Why can't you see how much more intelligent this is? You're not a middle manager, are you?

Re:Fork Gnome!

[CrackedButter]

He isn't stupid, i DID stop reading your previous post at the point he said I would.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Monkelectric]

Reminds me of a situation... I was invovled in the early formation of a distro in 1999 or so. This guy comes around and starts saying he has this wonderful idea -- hes gonna sell servers with our distro on it! He just needs us to make (extensive) modifications and he'll give us a 10% cut of the profits. When asked why we should do all the work and he should make the money, he says, "Well it was my idea."

Point being -- there are a lot of people who wanna be involved in OS but dont actually wanna do anything :)

Re:Fork Gnome!

[lewp]

Hey, I was using his words (for effect, mostly). That said, I understand reading more than a sentence or two at a time can be difficult for many folks. I'm sorry you're so afflicted.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[prsnmn]

It works for me, too. I'm a Gnome user and I don't have any complaints against it. No, Gnome doesn't *need* to do anything. Maybe I should have said it "If Gnome wants to gain desktop users . . " I shouldn't assume that the folks on the Gnome project are trying to gain ground in the desktop market. But that's my hope for them. I want to see a desktop environment that's as easy to use as Windows XP, so that Linux can be a viable option for end users who are fed up with MS security problems. I think it's getting close.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[rbanffy]

If Gnome wants to be that "closed" to its users, the users are free to fork the build, switch to KDE or build their own from scratch.

But it is very frustrating when you see a perfectly good product being ruined by not listening to what users want. True - it's up to independent developers to adopt a feature requested by some user, but corporate sponsors, who stand to gain something if and when FOSS becomes expressive on the corporate desktop market, could show more attention and encourage those developers that are paid to do useful development to actually do it.

Back in 2000 I joked that most hobbyist products developed cool features like skins months before they could do boring things such as printing.

I am not near the point of switching from Gnome - it is still my desktop of choice on any *nix (except MacOSS, of course), but there are many things that could and should be improved.

And don't make me talk about Mono.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[d34thm0nk3y]

If you're in the "OSS will rule the world" crowd, you need to understand that in order to succeed

I have this feeling that the "OSS will rule the world" crowd are not the ones actually developing the software. In fact, I am not sure where they came from...

Re:Fork Gnome!

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Bugs, mostly.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[joshsnow]

or must pay one, what is so difficult to understand about it?

Nothing, except that the project is already being massively funded by Novell, IBM, RedHat and in the past Sun.

It's received this level of sponsorship because people (users) want to use it. That's the entire point, GNOME has moved beyond an enthusiast/hacker project and the antisocial devs need to catch up with the reality. So do you.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[CrackedButter]

I am?

Re:Fork Gnome!

[joshsnow]

have this feeling that the "OSS will rule the world" crowd are not the ones actually developing the software.In fact, I am not sure where they came from...

Linus Torvalds has repeated stated "World Domination" as a goal of Linux based systems. There's a start for you.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Dr.Zap]

Did you RTFA? Most end-users are not sw developers.

RTFA? WTF? Most slashdot-readers are not article readers.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty sad when the first requirement for forking is knowledge of CVS. After learning CVS they can move on to less important topics like programming.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[halltk1983]

I use Gnome/Gentoo... and it's easier to use than WinXP. If youu have a problem with something in WinXP, often the ONLY way to fix it is a reinstall, which you now have to CALL MS customer service and talk to them for 25-35 mis, just to activate it, so they don't think you are stealing. I set my girlfriend up on gentoo, and she was happily punching away at things after a few minutes. She ran into a problem, looked it up in the forums, and fixed the problems. Her dad has to ask me to fix their Windows box about once a week, something goes wrong. And it takes me forever for some problems. Still trying to figure out why NWN Plat won't pass SoU interlude.... may have to reinstall... and why the sound card doesn't put out more than 25% of volume before last reinstall... may have to reinstall...
Anyways... moral of the story is, my BLONDE girlfriend picked up using Linux in about 5 mins with Gnome. She's learning to admin it. I'm still learning to admin WinXP, and I've admined GENTOO for about 3 yrs.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[zootm]

Are the users that are talking to them right now really the ones they want to adapt to, though?

Re:Fork Gnome!

[bhalo05]

Onley half-joke, half-serious, as good hackers do. When he is totally serious he admits Linux is still a few years away from mainstream desktop.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[KarmaMB84]

It's always a few years away. The "fuck the users" attitude is exactly why.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Taladar]

So you prefer a "fuck the developers" attitude?

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankfully the developers have all the power. Imagine all of the inane features you would see in software that users want just because they think its handy. These users are the same ones who gleefully would install comet cursor, bonzai buddy, and gator on their computers. The world is safe as long as users aren't designing software.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[nine-times]

Great, that's all we're missing... an Apple flamewar. In fact, are there any more raving lunatic zealots we can attract here? Let's just come up with a way to badmouth Gentoo while we're at it.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Greyfox]

Man, for less than the price of a Dr. Scholls wart pad a day you can hire a dozen Indian developers to take the code in any direction you want. You don't have to be a developer, you just have to be willing to put up with an extra foot wart or two. Isn't having a decent user interface worth having an extra foot wart or two?

Re:Fork Gnome!

[SA Stevens]

Linus Torvalds has repeated stated "World Domination" as a goal of Linux based systems. There's a start for you.

Linus has a great sense of humor. It's a shame more people don't.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[vandrad]

I'm thinking that "We listen to our customers

GNOME devs (for better or worse) are colunteer and don't have paying customers.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Leo McGarry]

Did I say "paying customers?"

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing stopping you from offering money to OSS developers for features you want.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Did you RTFA? Most end-users are not sw developers.

Well, if they aren't then what do they have to do with development process? They probably don't understand the intrinsics of user interface.
Those users usually want a specific fature for which developers see it won't fit in existing GUI model and won't be consistent (or at least until proper interface is available). Example: HW detection, automounting, codec support,changing mouse cursors without restart, etc. - all this stuff has to be lower level, not some dirty hacks in GUI shell.

For usability improvements, I think a group of a few talented and devoted developers can make much better GUI than users can propose. See how Microsoft or Apple do it.

And even so, I'm sure some Gnome developers read mailing lists and consider ideas. Then they participate in debates in devel mailing lists (or add to TODO mailing lists). That's how opensource is developed, that is how marketing research is supplemented.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[joshsnow]

Linus has a great sense of humor. It's a shame more people don't.

Indeed, and you're a prime example.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[SA Stevens]

"I know you are, but what am I?"

Re:Fork Gnome!

[joshsnow]

"I know you are, but what am I?"

I think not. You've given the game away completely.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[McGarnacle]

Thankfully the developers have all the power. Imagine all of the inane features you would see in software that users want just because they think its handy. These users are the same ones who gleefully would install comet cursor, bonzai buddy, and gator on their computers. The world is safe as long as users aren't designing software.

This reminds me of that one episode of the Simpsons where Homer's brother (Herb?) lets him design a new car for his company: "The Car Designed by and for the Average Joe"

...If you haven't seen it, the conclusion is the car tanks and his brother's company goes out of business.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[SA Stevens]

This is all just a game for you?

You are the one who just tipped your hand, dude.

But, back to the matter being discussed:

Linus has always, clearly, made people aware of the fact that his 'World Domination' statements are meant as humor.

The man doesn't care if Linux 'achives world domination' and has hinted he feels sorry for people that fanatical.

Re:Fork Gnome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing, except that the project is already being massively funded by Novell, IBM, RedHat and in the past Sun.

True. And the customers of those companies are the users GNOME DOES listen to. They don't listen to you, or any other whine on /., or Eugenia Trolliquery, but that's because you don't represent the same demographic.

That's the entire point, GNOME has moved beyond an enthusiast/hacker project

Indeed it has. And thus "the antisocial devs" now listen to someone other than the enthuasiasts - who will be pissed off, leading to stupid articles like this one.

For those just joining the discussion

[Anonymous Coward]

For those just joining the discussion, you MUST read the whole thread, "roadmap status update/update request", Luis Villa, http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/ 2005-March/thread.html#00078

They didn't tell her to STFU or to F off & die. They gave her reasons why her idea for an official poll would not work. They gave her reasonable suggestions on how & why feature requests may go unfulfilled. She rallied & reiterated her points but they did not fall on dead ears. Read through the mailing list and see it for yourself. She is just one person and is guaranteed to have her own opinion. They are devels working on it & they have their own opinions.

See also a coincidental GNOME dev blog, March 10 Jakub Steiner's blog on how to request features: http://jimmac.musichall.cz/weblog.php

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't tell her to STFU or to F off & die.

Sure ?

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[Anonymous Coward]

The author of the article was told:

None of us want to be forced into unsubscribing people or creating
private lists or any of our other similar options.

Sure sounds like "don't bring these things to our attention, now f-off and die" to me!

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[Vann_v2]

Not really. The point was that there's a whole mailing list dedicated to Gnome marketing, and that desktop-devel is not the appropriate place to discuss her idea.

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[Anonymous Coward]

First one was polite & to the point.
Second one certainly was arrogant but not at all the equivalent of a STFU & FOAD.
From your POV you see that it is, then how you do you handle it when someone shouts at you in real life FOAD? How would you handle this situation where two opposing opinions come to a head?

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[ajs]

Interesting thread. The basic concept is this: "we should have a page specially designed for tracking feature requests".

The answers varied, but seemed to center on "no, we have bugzilla" and "if you want to do that with bugzilla, create a special query page for devs to review feature requests."

This sounds like reasonable advice to me....

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[Abcd1234]

"if you want to do that with bugzilla, create a special query page for devs to review feature requests."

Why would you do that when you could just query for bugs with the severity set to "Enhancement"?

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[Anonymous Coward]

That would require the users submitting bugs to know what the hell they are doing. These days it seems that every new feature is "urgent" or "critical".

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[ajs]

Why would you ever can any query? Simple, to save keystrokes, and increase the likelyhood that any given dev will actually USE the query. What you suggest might also not be sufficient. For example, there might be so many requests that a menu editor be put back in that it's ranked as "urgent", and yet it's still an enhancement request. A keyword would be a better way to track such things.

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[gmhowell]

They didn't tell her to STFU or to F off & die.

That's really a shame, because somebody really should say that to Eugenia.

Daily.

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[meatspray]

Yes, more or less they did. Then again if a quarter of my emails in a day came from one irate user trying to be the squeeky wheel, I can't say that I wouldn't tell them the same thing.

If it's an open source initiative, isn't the user in question entitled to contribute their own code?

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[lazyl]

They gave her reasonable suggestions on how & why feature requests may go unfulfilled

Which basically amounted to 'the devs don't feel like implementing them'

They gave her reasons why her idea for an official poll would not work

Because the devs might ignore the poll which would make the users upset and create a conflict.

I think her complaints have merit. Seems to me that the devs are insisting on having absolutely zero commitment to considering user requests.

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[Anonymous Coward]

It's really like this: The people who do the work have the last word on what gets done. If you want it any other way you have to shift the investment to the people whom you want to make the decisions. Usually this means you have to pay the developers, which compensates their investment and increases yours, so you get to make the decisions.

Most developers will listen to feature requests and recommendations. Very often this input changes the course of the project, but the degree to which their decisions are influenced depends on the strength of their own point of view. On the other hand nobody likes to hear "I want you to do it my way" repeatedly. If a developer who is not getting paid by you tells you it's not going to go your way, that should be enough to shut you up. This is most important regarding topics which are prone to unsolvable disagreement (anything involving the look and feel, for example).

The Gnome hackers explained their point of view and rejected hers, but she kept reiterating her point. That is just rude and the result was that the hackers gave her a very moderate warning about the possible consequences of obnoxiousness.

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[Anonymous Coward]

It should also be pointed out that the desktop-devel list has been plagued in the past by off-topic nonsense -- lots of it posted by Eugenia -- to the point where the list became useless and the developers unsubscribed.

There are lots of GNOME lists... ones for discussing the business side of GNOME, ones for discussing marketing, ones for beginners. Desktop-devel is for desktop developers to talk about code development... not for silly whiny cows like Eugenia to fill with her off-topic neurotic nonsense. Yet she insists on doing it right after the list has *finally* been cleaned up and the developer have returned and started using it for its intended purpose.

And this idiotic article is yet another example of why slashdot is worthless as any kind of geek news site.

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[merdark]

And this illustrates a problem with open source. People only want to 'scratch their own itches' and so users who can't program but want specific features are left in the dust.

And before someone pipes up "well the users can PAY someone to implement those features", no they can't. First, it is unreasonble to expect an average user to be able to find an appropriate programmer, most have troulbe even USING the software. Even if they could find an appropriate developer, it is unreasonable to expect one user to incur the entire cost of feature development for a feature or program that many people want.

There is currently no easy way for end users to organize developer pools, and figuring out the logistics of such a thing is highly non-trivial.

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[cheesybagel]

How about if they considered it and found it wasn't worth their effort? You are saying the developers should implement a feature on their own dime only because she claims it is useful?

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[Abcd1234]

Why would you ever can any query? Simple, to save keystrokes, and increase the likelyhood that any given dev will actually USE the query.

Umm, you can already can queries. Simply save the query and have it display in your footer. Again, there's no need to re-implement functionality that's already available. Moreover, this allows the developer to tailor the query to just the components they're responsible for.

For example, there might be so many requests that a menu editor be put back in that it's ranked as "urgent", and yet it's still an enhancement request.

And that, really, is the crux of the problem. Stupid users. Educate them.

A keyword would be a better way to track such things.

No, it's duplicating functionality that's already present. Moveover, what makes you think the users will use this "keyword" thing of yours, anyway? They already don't use the existing functionality.

Face it, this is not a technological problem, it's a user-education problem. Teach them how to use the existing functionality. Re-implementing existing features is nothing but wasting time, especially considering you'd have to educate the user-base on how to use this "new" feature, anyway.

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, then how pray tell would you suggest things should be handled? Suppose I'm a developer and I have a strong opinion on an issue regarding the things I'm working on. You have a differing and equally strong opinion. I'm the one who is going to actually work on solving the problem either way. If you're not going to pay me, then why should I listen to you, ignore my own point of view and essentially work for you? Is it really too much to ask that you go find yourself a developer who agrees with you and does the job? Do you have to insist on me doing something in what I think is the wrong way?

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[955301]

Yep. After all, those posts came after this one, and at some point, you have to blow the whistle and get the fans off the court so you can continue:


Jeff was certainly curt, and perhaps should have been gentler in making
the point, but he's probably right too. In his judgment (and mine too,
fwiw) that thread was doomed to produce very little impact, a lot of
noise.

Something GNOME enthusiasts on this list often seem to forget is that
its *not* just their time. When you send a message to a mailing list,
you are asking for everyone to spend some time on it. When you start a
thread that will draw lots of replies, you are, unwittingly or not,
asking for everyone on the list (including hackers) to spend lots of
time.

I define the GNOME enthusiast community as: those who are actively
involved with and interested in GNOME but have NOT contributed large
quantities of code, translation or documentation (there are several
exceptional cases, for example Jeff himself, but not a lot). We need
enthusiasts and should value them! It provides a source of excitement,
sociability, feedback on how we're doing in different areas, and
sometimes even new ideas.

But right now, the lists have become driven by the enthusiast community
to the extent that hackers have gone into hiding. A good thread on
desktop-devel-list *should* be predominantly (75% or more, say, as a
totally arbitrary number) posts by core GNOME hackers related to that
area. Look at a thread now.... probably 90% of the posts are by
enthusiasts. That's taking "being in touch with the community" a little
too far to the point that its hard to get work done ;-)

For example, most of the people actually writing code that will be in
the next GNOME release have probably been actively deleting every
message to this theme thread! Its not because they don't care, its
because they don't want to take the time away from working on gnome to
wade through all the noise. And they shouldn't have to.

Compared to its peak as a lively discourse among the hackers doing core
contributions to the gnome codebase, desktop-devel-list is almost a dead
list in terms of "useful things accomplished". Part of the problem is a
*very* high noise level, and also very annoying persistent threads of
the bike shed variety.

Something people only relatively recently involved in GNOME (last couple
years) wonder is about the relative silence / non-responsiveness of core
hackers. It seems like desktop-devel-list, despite all the traffic, has
very few people who are getting something done (see usability gnome org
for an even worse example of this that is even more my fault). That the
lists we (core hackers) used to haunt have become a tangle of weeds is
one of the major factors driving this.

As community leaders in GNOME, one of our jobs is to shepherd the lists
so they do not become exceedingly noisy (and scare away important hacker
to hacker traffic). But we have largely abdicated this responsibility in
the last couple years. markmc tried to fight the tide about a year ago,
but eventually gave up. Its hard *because* we're actually very nice
people, and thus none of us want to be the list nazi. But its also very
important to have this sort of pruning to be a healthy community.

We've been talking about this a lot lately in s33kret cabal discussions.
That we feel the need to have these private circles is part of the
problem! Nobody, even those of us involved in the cabal (and especially
not Jeff who is an outspoken supporter of openness and inclusion), want
this sort of private exclusionary construct.

So what's the point?

1) Desktop-devel-list, #gnome-hackers, etc have been drowned by a deluge
of well meaning (and healthy, when found in moderation) enthusiast
involvement.
2) The loss of effective communication channels has had a major negative
impact on the amount and p

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[Jason Earl]

Open Source is no different from proprietary software. In the long run the features that people pay money to implement get implemented. Eugenia is just upset because the Gnome folks aren't particularly interested in courting existing Gnome users. Gnome doesn't want Eugenia's input, it wants your CIO's input, and then after that it wants your grandmother's input.

Gnome already went down the path of listening to hackers, and they ended up with a ridiculously configurable desktop with a Window manager (sawfish) that was scriptable in lisp. Now, I don't have anything against lisp. Heck, I spend the better part of my day in Emacs. The problem is that hackers want an entirely different kind of system than normal users (Emacs is an excellent example of this). As Gnome simplifies its desktop folks like Eugenia get all upset. They liked the Gnome with a hojillion options, and they wish they could force the project back in that direction (without writing code, of course).

End user input is pouring into Gnome at a fantastic pace. It just isn't coming in from bugzilla, or from the mailing lists, or some other "hacker" interface, but rather it is coming in from the marketing departments at Red Hat, Novell, and Sun. Those guys are talking to actual customers and finding out ways to sell them Free Software. Then they march back to their respective companies and they give the hackers their marching orders.

Do I miss some of the cool Gnome features that have been removed or hidden? Yeah, I do. I miss the easy access to readline completion in file open dialogs, I don't like having to hit "SHIFT" to turn snap to Window on, and piles of other little niggles. However, I would rather have Gnome listen to normal customers and succeed than listen exclusively to hackers and fail. Push comes to shove I will always have Emacs...

There's no question that Gnome 2 is easier for my wife to use, and that's what really matters.

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[merdark]

I agree with all that, and perhaps having corporations involved is a good model for the future. I didn't think of this, thanks for the comment.

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[Trepalium]

There certainly are ways for the end users to pay for someone to implement the features. The first (and most obvious) way is to go to the distributor (Novell, Red Hat, or Sun), and ask them to include the feature you desire. If you're a paying customer, you should have some sort of a voice at the company. The other option is a bounty system, where individual users can contribute to a pot of money that is paid out to the first person who implements the specific feature. I'm sure there are other methods for directing your funding to specific tasks, as well. On the other hand, telling people what to do when you have not given them anything in return is a sure fire way to get stonewalled.

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[MrWa]

They are devels working on it & they have their own opinions.

So FreeBSD decides they want a new logo and the Gnome group thinks they can take Beastie away!

Never!

You choose to put a foot in your mouth and you just have to learn to like it!

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[Jason Earl]

I am all for anything that promotes hackers getting paid to write Free Software. Especially if the software that gets written allows me to replace proprietary software.

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[ajs]

You're massively confused about the definition of a query and a user as I used them in my post. I can't even really respond to what you said directly without clearing up those points first.

Ok, so you're saying that you can already can queries... yes, of course you can, what on earth did you think was being suggested by canning a query, and how does canning such a query involve re-inventing anything at all?! The suggestion was that, instead of going off and creating some OTHER SITE to track feature requests, instead a canned query be used in bugzilla. I think perhaps you got confused over what the list members had suggested, since you seem to be echoing their comments.

Second, you call the users "stupid". First off, remember that the "users" in this case are the developers who wrote Gnome. They're not stupid. Ranking a feature request as urgen becuase it's one of the highest profile items in the database is also not stupid. Using a keyword (standard bugzilla functionality for years) is to then collect all such requests is also not stupid.

I'm not sure if you just got confused over who we were talking about, or you just assumed that the Gnome developers were all just a bunch of monkeys banging on a keyboard until the result compiled, but I can assure you that both are incorrect.

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[Abcd1234]

Second, you call the users "stupid". First off, remember that the "users" in this case are the developers who wrote Gnome.

No, actually, I was referring to the stupid users who were submitted feature requests as Urgent, which I expect are the users of Gnome, not the developers themselves. I hope.

Ranking a feature request as urgen becuase it's one of the highest profile items in the database is also not stupid

Umm, yes, it is. The severity is there to identify how, err, severe a defect is. ie, a crasher during normal operations is Critical. A feature request is *not* Critical. It's an Enhancement. Geez, what do you think the Enhancement level is *there* for??

If you want to prioritize feature requests, either use the Priority field, or make use of the bug voting system. Changing the severity is the wrong way to do it.

Using a keyword (standard bugzilla functionality for years) is to then collect all such requests is also not stupid.

Well, not so much stupid as unnecessary.

Re:For those just joining the discussion

[GigsVT]

what do you think the Enhancement level is *there* for??

That the option exists at all, and is implemented as the lowest priority highlights the crux of this whole discussion.

User requested enhancements, instead of being the driving force behind projects, are stuffed away in the lowest priority level.

I think your attitude sums things up very well.

I don't know...

[Phydeaux314]

With the user base that GNOME has, can they spend the time to pay attention to all the users? They should listen to their userbase, but if they can't spend the time to pay attention to all of it... Just the idle musings of a new person...

Re:I don't know...

[TheWanderingHermit]

I agree -- that they should listen to their user base, but there's more to it than that. It's not like they're selling Gnome or making profit off it, so there is really no reason to please users or to do anything other than program the kind of DE that Gnome developers want.

That being said, I dropped Gnome years ago because I felt it was focused more on programmers doing what they wanted and giving other programmers cool programming stuff, and KDE was much more focused on an easy to use experience.

And before I get the usual flames from someone with no life that thinks anyone who doesn't use a console is a a loser, I have a small business I run that is based on software I wrote. I was using command lines back in the late 1970s when I was lucky to get time on a paper terminal and excited when I could use a VDT.

I spent years in between teaching special ed and learned that people actually think in different styles, so many people will always do better with a GUI. My experience is that KDE has always been focused on creating a good GUI for the end user, wereas Gnome was more focused on a GUI with great APIs and everything programmers want, without a reall awareness of what helps end users.

Re:I don't know...

[ErichTheWebGuy]

With the user base that GNOME has, can they spend the time to pay attention to all the users?

How long can it take to listen to three people! *watches karma float away*

Re:I don't know...

[Leo McGarry]

Well, let's be realistic here. The user base is tiny by any reasonable sense of proportion.

But ignoring that, the question should be, "Can they afford not to listen to their users, if they want to have any users left?"

Re:I don't know...

[Slack3r78]

You know, I actually laughed out loud when I read this comment, because I switched from KDE to Gnome for the exact reasons you did the opposite. Guess it goes to show how tastes vary. :-)

IMO, Gnome is very focused on making things easy for the user, and very usability-test centric. The developers seem to want to stick to usability testing and the Sun-funded HIG almost to a fault at times. To the point that they *do* listen to usability tests more so than the users. There are times where this is bad, but at the same time, there are times that it's the only way to actually get a feature implemented.

Has KDE developed a comprehensive HIG and/or UI guidelines for its DE? I honestly don't know. I'd always assumed not because K apps tend to do things their own way and I've never been able to find much consistency between them.

Again, I don't think KDE is a bad enviro, I think it's largely a matter of taste. Gnome leans toward a very simple, sparse environment, whereas KDE these days leans towards a complex, but highly customizable enivornement. I personally find the former easier to use, but there are certainly arguments for the latter.

Re:I don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

So what if Gnome caters to a subset of users and doesn't follow KDE's bloaty lowest-common-denominator approach? The greatest thing about Linux and the X environment is that people have CHOICES! Don't like Gnome? Don't use it! I don't use KDE or Gnome because I think Fluxbox is better...for me! Or if you don't like any of those choices, there's many more.

But if ease of use is the only thing that matters, then let's all chuck our Linux boxes and get a Mac and run AOL on it??

On second thought... Nah.

Re:I don't know...

[mitchskin]

You have to build the foundation first. Making things easy to use is a hugely important goal for the GNOME devs, but there's a lot of plumbing, a lot of low-level system work that's required to make things easy to use. Things like HAL and NetworkManager are great examples of this. If you can write a piece of system software to configure something automatically, you'd be doing your users a disservice by diverting effort into making a pretty GUI to configure it.

Re:I don't know...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

And before I get the usual flames from someone with no life that thinks anyone who doesn't use a console is a a loser, I have a small business I run that is based on software I wrote. I was using command lines back in the late 1970s when I was lucky to get time on a paper terminal and excited when I could use a VDT.

Is your small business in a room with steeply sloped floors carpeted in broken glass with a snow machine bolted to the ceiling?

Re:I don't know...

[Billly Gates]

I got flamed here from KDE zealots over the usability study, even though I have a preference for KDE.

Gnome is getting better by each release. Its no longer the buggy non integrated manager it was during the 1.x days when enlightenment was used as teh manager and gnome as an extention. Shudder

Gnome 2.10 shows the UI material by SUN has paid off.

KDE in my opinion use to be better but is going downhill.

SuSE is providing UI testing and SUN is letting the KDE developers in on the same data Gnome is using.

Kde 4.0 will have a UI rewrite to cater to more users. I can't wait!

In the meantime I hope it gets quicker. Times for compiling kde on my athlon 1800 use to be 5-6 hours for kde 3.0 but now take 9!

Re:I don't know...

[10Ghz]

Has KDE developed a comprehensive HIG and/or UI guidelines for its DE?

You mean something like this?

Hmmmm...

[ectotherm]

I thought it was supposed to be PEOPLE that thought GNOMES didn't exist, not the other way around... ;)

Heh

[Neil Blender]

I love it when people gripe about free software.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

What's even funnier is when the same people praise expensive software which is inherently broken. Oh wait, no...that's just sad...

Re:Heh

[rainman_bc]

I love it when people gripe about free software.

Hmmm... Isn't Gnome the standard desktop on Redhat Enterprise? That's not free.... As many other distros aren't either.

It's these distros who are being complacent. If users are requesting features, it's these distros who are partly responsible for getting the changes into Gnome.

And let's face it, I've bitched before about this, the lack of a menu editor in Gnome is appaling.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

OSS developers had better get used to people griping about free software. I am not a developer, not even a computer scientist, and I get rather annoyed when I make complaints about open source software that gets the "why don't you write the fix yourself." Uh, because I am an end user. I think OSS might hit a wall with its push into the mainstream desktop realm because not everything out there is designed with the end user in mind. And if the OSS proponents are preaching that we should all switch to free OSS software, then you can't blame the people who switch for bitching about problems with the software. Blame the preachers for telling people to switch before anything was really mature or end user focussed.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats why so many developers like OSS, they can write crap code and not feel bad about it.

Re:Heh

[jxyama]

i completely disagree with your sentiment. just because it's free doesn't mean it shouldn't be subjected to gripes or that it shouldn't be held to certain standards.

if i volunteer for something, can i just ditch it since i'm "doing it for free?" absolutely not.

Re:Heh

[Abcd1234]

if i volunteer for something, can i just ditch it since i'm "doing it for free?" absolutely not.

Pardon?! Hell, if I'm working at a place where I'm getting *paid*, I can just ditch if I feel like it. This is doubly true for volunteer work. Of course, whether that makes you a "good person" or not is up to you to decide. What you're talking about is usually known as "indentured servitude"...

Re:Heh

[fm6]

The whole point of "free" software is that people can complain.

Re:Heh

[BoldAndBusted]

K. Then perhaps you should bring up your problem with Red Hat, since you paid them?

Re:Heh

[lewp]

If you're a customer of Red Hat's, and you're either worth enough money to them, or are willing to pay them to implement it, I'm sure their engineers will do it for you. If not, I'm sure SuSE will. If not, Mandrake. If not... well, there's always Microsoft (because they'll jump right on your feature requests, too; I'm sure they'll be in Longhorn... in 2010).

Obviously nobody who is capable of actually implementing a menu editor wants one that badly. Unless you're willing to make it worth the while of one of these people/companies, why do you feel entitled to bitch about it?

Lesson: Open source programmers are not your personal bitches. They're not here to do whatever you want for free. They write software for themselves or because a company pays them, and they are smart enough to see the benefit of donating that code back to the community. Ultimately they only have to answer to themselves or to their employers.

If something's that important to you, put up or shut up.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Crowhead]

The whole point of "free" software is that people can complain.

Uh, no it isn't.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

That's part of the problem. I have purchased SUSE and guess what: that package is not our problem, talk to XYZ people at this forum. Well, they think that feature works just fine and see no reason to change it, and meanwhile there is no real alternative for Linux. Great fucking situation. The GIMP is a perfect example. At least I can still dual boot into Windows for dealing with graphics. But I am not so sure that the reality of OSS lives up to the hype of OSS. It seems to be just as buggy, just as unstable, and just as feature poor as many closed for profit options. At least with those options I don't get told to fuck off and code it myself by pricks like you. They may not be my personal bitches, but if they are going to preach to people to join the community they can not hide in their little corner; they have to respond to the general end user problems and issues. And they need to maintain code they have written or at least make sure it gets passed off to somebody who will maintain it, especially if it is getting used in distros.

Re:Heh

[BoldAndBusted]

Well, that was their mistake for asking for surly leeches like you to join their community. Do you know how many man-hours it takes to build something with even half the capabilities of software like the GIMP? You paid a small amount of money to have a truckload of software given to you in digestible morsels (i.e. your for-profit distro). That's all you paid for.

But hey, if you want to help and not just bitch, dive in! Lose the "entitled" attitude, tho.

Re:Heh

[rainman_bc]

Me a customer??? Honestly, I recommend Redhat Enterprise for corporate clients, but I never recomment redhat on the desktop. Not worth paying for IMO, when there's some really good distros out there that are free.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize this, but I am not a developer and I have no interest in diving in. My point is that way too much talk about Linux being ready for the desktop is being put out when its not really tehre yet. I am a biologist and I am more worried about my research than spending time writing code so the GIMP can support multiple layer sets. My point is that the OSS community keeps saying, "We are ready for the mainstream desktop, and our stuff is superior to closed source for profit options." Look, costs isn't a factor here for me. That's the beauty of having a lab and grants that pays for this stuff. But when you advertise that you're product is ready for everybody to use, then you should be ready to fix problems that people have. Telling people to dive in and join the coding process is crazy. If OSS is going to make it in the real world of mainstream desktop use (or even in my lab, where we have people like me who can code in java, C#, perl, and python) then it better get organized to face the masses. Otherwise, people and companies are going to stay with crap. I just want an alternative to MS that doesn't suck or requrie shitloads of time. And I hate Macs. I guess that all I really care about is getting a solid Linux environment with the type of software support you get in the Windows world - which has been really good for our lab. I started switching our systems to Linux in the hope to add to the critical mass to get Linux to the point where companies like Adobe start porting there software over to Linux. I like the Linux OS, but I dislike the lack of features or cheap quality of most of the applications. That's my problem and why we can't move off Windows or Mac until Linux matures to the point described above.

Re:Heh

[rainman_bc]

Usability is a concern for everyone in Linux world, but mostly those who have a financial interest in selling more copies of their distro. Me? I honestly can code my way out of it if I really want to, or read scores of documentation and updated the .desktop files. Doesn't bother me too much.

But when end user "x" installs a piece of software on a Gnome machine, and can't find a way to remove the shortcuts in their menu, or can't find a way to add them because the package didn't add them, this is a direct problem with usability. Gnome can chose to ignore me and it isn't going to make the slightest difference in my life. I can always switch to KDE or xfce or whatever if I feel like Gnome doesn't work for me.

Re:Heh

[lewp]

Fact of the matter is, most end user folks aren't going to bother adding a menu item or desktop icon for a program. If the package doesn't add it (which shouldn't be a problem with sane package management and fd.o standards) the user is going to stop right there.

A menu editor is mainly useful to folks who want to compile and install software from source tarballs, or to customize the way their current menu is laid out. Neither of these is a particularly big deal for end users, and just about everyone who is going to be rabid about doing it is going to have the necessary skills to do it without a dedicated menu editor.

I can understand that many people want one, but I can't see it being something that is blocking widespread GNOME acceptance or anything like that.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it is.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in the spirit of free/OSS zealots the code is "free as in freedom" not "free as in beer". So it's entirely appropriate to complain about "free" software since it has nothing to do with cost.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it when people who claim they are doing charity by writing code without pay get pissed off when people criticize it. If you don't like getting feedback, keep your fucking code to yourself and nobody will bother you.

Re:Heh

[rainman_bc]

You're right. Most end user folks will download a package from an rpm or a yum/apt/portage reposiotory and stare at their OS wondering why the menu item for the application they just installed didn't appear, and then ask to have Windows installed instead.

Either Linux is for the Elite, or it's ready for the desktop. Can't have it both ways IMO.

Re:Heh

[KarmaMB84]

Why bother anyway, it's always going to suck.

Re:Heh

[donscarletti]

I'm a Gnome developer. And it's not my buisiness that gnome is the standard desktop of any non-free distribution. By the time my package leaves my computer its free, and that's all I care about. If you payed someone for your distro, maybe you should ask them to fix your problem.

Re:Heh

[rainman_bc]

I never paid - but those who are interested in usability, folks like Lycoris and Linspire for example are interested in usability.

They should be the ones contributing to the usability of Gnome. That was all I meant. They have a financial interest in making Gnome better for end users. They are making the desktop push, not I.

I've honestly been trying to enjoy linux on the desktop since Mandrake 5. FC3 is the first distro IMO that has done everything I've wanted with two exceptions: Executing something off an smb file system - it'd be nice if Gnome auto mounted the smb share, executed the file, and unmounted when it didn't need it, and the second is the menu editor, which you guys can probably port over from Xfce.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Gnome the standard desktop on Redhat Enterprise? That's not free....

Thanks to the GPL, Gnome is free as in speech, no matter who redistributes it.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here, I once had a problem making images with cdrdao and modified it so that I got perfect images in a way not thought of by their developers and not useful to most people. Did I release it back to the community? no. I also added joystick support to xgalaga because I disliked playing it with a mouse. Did I bitch to the maintainers about it and complain they weren't listening to me? no. Just because these users feel they are relevant doesn't mean they are. They need to use windows xp like everyone else and get over themselves. Linux is for programmers.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

If Linux wants to move to the desktop as almost every Linux user seems to think it should, then code maintainers need to at least deal with the end users who migrate in a reasonable fashion. Telling people to put up or shut up is just stupid and will not help Linux recognition. I think Linux is a great OS, but has shit for a community (mostly seem like elitist pricks who have no other life) and applications (OO.org and Mozilla are great, but not Linux specific). I would really like to implement Linux on the desktop for security and stability, but with applications lacking in features and developers whining about time to develop, it seems like the MS claim about code maintainence might ring true. I am a dual booter, but Windows gets more attention anymore because I can actually get work done rather than trying to find some GIMP plugin that doesn't exist or spending hours working through dependency problems. The community needs to standardize these things. I only hope that Novell and IBM can get their shit together and put out their own standards. Please pull Linux out of mothers' basements.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it is. GPL freedom is not about price. If you can complain about Windows XP, you can complain about Gnome.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

By the time my package leaves my computer its free, and that's all I care about.

That's all you care about? Not the end users? Excellent. So if it has huge usability problems, that's ok, so long as it's free?

Re:Heh

[donscarletti]

I never said that. I care about usibility issues. But what I don't give a damn about is however much he payed for his software from distros.

Re:Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to care about usability problems that don't exist.

This is on the mark

[winkydink]

If most OSS is developed by developers based on what they choose to implement, then OSS will be limited mostly to developers.

Real, for-profit development succeeds mostly by doing something the customer wants. That's the real-world bar that's been set by "the rest of the user community". By failing to listen to and develop to their requests, OSS risks becoming perceived as elitist, which will hamper wide-spread adoption.

Re:This is on the mark

[geckofiend]

And why should a bunch of people who work for free should care about how many people will be using their software and not contributing anything back?

Users need to get a grip. Just like any other software if you don't like it use something else. You think that because the source is open and the softwre is free you suddenly have more say that what you would have with some closed source software shop?

For the life of me I don't understand why the users think our success is based on how many leaches we have taking advantage of our work.

Re:This is on the mark

[ajs]

"Real, for-profit development succeeds mostly by doing something the customer wants."

And so Gnome, being the combined effort of real, for-profit companies like Novell, Sun, IBM, Red Hat and many others is... I'm sorry, what was your point there again?

"By failing to listen to and develop to their requests"

No, you see that's just the problem. Tools and systems like Gnome (which is a far-reaching set of specs, libraries and applications, which few of its users appreciate the value of, nor take advantage of beyond creating cute menus), are desgined for the needs of a huge and diverse community of users and user needs. Gnome satisfies the needs of its users....

AND THAT IS WHAT THE SLASHDOT CROWD HATES. We, here at Slashdot, are a microcosm of developers and geeks of various flavors. We have specialized needs, and we hate seeing out tools "watered down" by the needs of the average user.

That's fair, and I'm not saying that we should not push for our needs too, but face it: Gnome and KDE have both reached a level of popularity where your average Slashdotter is no longer the primary target-user. Cope.

Re:This is on the mark

[thenextpresident]

Actually, from TFA:

"I got the answer I expected from the Novell/Sun/Red-Hat people: "regarding market research, we care about it only when happens from our marketing department and to our customers". They don't care about the "generic" Gnome user. That's ok. Understandable. These guys have a business to run.

However, I was not happy from the answer I got from the Gnome developers who don't work for a Gnome-related corporation: "

So basically, according to here, people responded from companies that basically said they are listening to do implement features that companies want.

But then she gets upset that the people that implement this stuff on their own time should do what she wants.

So really she has people who are listening to the customers, and you have people doing their own thing. How is that wrong? If I got into a project and people started using it, should I never work on my own stuff again?

Re:This is on the mark

[winkydink]

If you have the most perfect desktop in environment known since the invention of the desk and jyou are the only person using it, is it successful? To you maybe, but to you only.

Re:This is on the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the fucking point. It's made by us, for us, so we use it. If you're so in love with the idiot-centric commercial model, just go buy some more of it and leave us alone.

Re:This is on the mark

[winkydink]

Then you should probably learn to live with MS's market share. You can't have it both ways.

If you're so in love with the idiot-centric commercial model, just go buy some more of it and leave us alone.

See my elitist comment above.

Re:This is on the mark

[nekoniku]

If most OSS is developed by developers based on what they choose to implement, then OSS will be limited mostly to developers.

"Developers! Developers! Developers!"

{...shudder...}

Re:This is on the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

1998 called; it wants its arguments against OSS back.

Those sentiments are neither original or new. In fact, at one point, those ideas were held close as a source of pride -- an OS by developers for the developers.

Real OSS hackers could care less if your grandma can use linux. If she doesn't like it then she can pitch in and help too -- but I'm not doing it for her; I'm doing it for me.

Re:This is on the mark

[Taladar]

If it is the most efficient desktop for you and all future projects are twice as fast compared to a "for the masses" desktop then yes, it is successful.

Re:This is on the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't have it both ways.

And why would I want to?

Re:This is on the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

"And why should a bunch of people who work for free should care about how many people will be using their software and not contributing anything back?"

Why should a bunch of people who work for free give their work away to people whos needs they don't care about?

Re:This is on the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

I think concern for "watering down" tools is more of a Unix/Linux cultural thing, not a general geek issue.

Re:This is on the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

So why are you even reading or posting about this on Slashdot? If you want to be "left alone", just write your code and don't read stuff that annoys you.

Re:This is on the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

You are looking at it from the wrong perspective. Developers are and always will be Gnome's users. End users are the target of the applications developed by the developers. The better Gnome is for developers the better gnome becomes as a platform for end users.

Re:This is on the mark

[Per Abrahamsen]

> Real, for-profit development succeeds mostly by doing something the customer wants.

And if you read the article, you will see that the real, for-profit companies are doing market research of their own.

When the moron is complaining about is that the *hobbyist* are just doing what they themselves need, rather than working free for every whiny user out there.

She wants professional service for free.

The code is free, the developer time isn't.

Weird...

[GillBates0]

GNOME and its apparent lack of interest on user feedback

GNOME seems to respond to my mouse gestures and keypresses pretty effectively.

Granted, I haven't been able to train it yet to respond to my thought signals and verbal commands, but I would hardly attribute it to GNOME's lack of interest to obey me.

This has been happening for a while

[ErichTheWebGuy]

This has been going on for quite some time. That is why people who are fed up started their own Gnome branch, GoneMe that fixes the things they think are wrong with Gnome.

Re:This has been happening for a while

[kabz]

Is this related to the new upcoming Disney sequel 'Finding gNemo' ...

Hot Button Topic

[excyl]

It seems that /. is on a binge of Mozilla and GNOME rants. From all the different stories, I'm almost suprised that the mods haven't forked both projects themselves. With the amount of coverage given to the defects in the projects, the casual reader might think that the FOSS movement is dying. I hear that somebody doesn't like the KDE development model, so let's see if that a news item in the next day or so.

Re:Hot Button Topic

[Anonymous Coward]

It is official; Eugenia confirms: FOSS is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered FOSS community when OSNEWS confirmed that FOSS market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all users. Coming on the heels of a recent Loli-Queru survey which plainly states that FOSS has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. FOSS is collapsing in complete disarray.
You don't need to be a Eugenia to predict FOSS's future. The hand writing is on the wall: FOSS faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for FOSS because FOSS is dying. Things are looking very bad for FOSS. As many of us are already aware, FOSS continues to lose market share. Apathy flows like a river of blood.
GNOME is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. There can no longer be any doubt: FOSS is dying.
Due to internal squabbles, threats of forking, and so on, FOSS will surely go out of business and be taken over by AAPL who sell another troubled OS. Now Mozilla is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that FOSS has steadily declined in market share. FOSS is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If FOSS is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. FOSS continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, FOSS is dead.
Fact: FOSS is dying

Re:Hot Button Topic

[Anonymous Coward]

there already exists a Gnome fork although it doesn't seem very active: http://goneme.sourceforge.net/

Re:Hot Button Topic

[Anonymous Coward]

> I hear that somebody doesn't like the KDE
> development model, so let's see if that a news
> item in the next day or so.

No problem. KDE developers are extremely responsive. If you want another kitchen sink, developers are more than happy to install another gold plated kitchen sink configurable to your needs right beside the other twelve. They'll even install it on your motorcycle so you can wash while you drive.

It's called giving the customer everything he/she wants.

What's not to like about KDE?

Re:Hot Button Topic

[Cylix]

If you think about it...

There is a story in a story here.

On one hand, you could read things literally or you could really take a step back. It's really a story about someone looking to garner attention and looks like being a terrible nuissance. It seems someone /wants/ to be the voice of gnome, but really isn't.

Then of course, there is a grand hoopla and the person stirring up the pot writes about it for more attention.

Finally, the question is... does anyone really get it yet?

I tend to lean towards a yes on this one. There have been enough comments that signify everyone sees through the lame fuss. Unfortunately, drama tends to catch the eyes and thusly makes for a good article for selection. (Even if the drama was created by one voice)

Re:Hot Button Topic

[Anonymous Coward]

There one minor little nit-pick that annoys me about KDE vs gnome. the widgets in the environment, in gnome they seem to be tighter, tiny, while on KDE they tend to be more big and bulky. I mean like the top bar in windows xp, it's excessively large in the amount of screen realestate that it uses up for what it does. I'd love to see more compact widgets, buttons, and scrollbars in KDE. Baghira seems to be in the right direction IMO.

Re:Hot Button Topic

[nine-times]

With the amount of coverage given to the defects in the projects, the casual reader might think that the FOSS movement is dying.

Or else FOSS is about to blow up (in the good way). Why are people getting so upset and paying so much attention if there weren't a lot of people interested in the future of these projects? Why would people be getting worked up over developers response to users if there weren't a lot of non-developer users who are using these products?

Seems to me each story has turned into a strange sort of developer vs. user vs. advocate flame-war, indicating that there are large numbers in each group, each with a certain amount of passion for seeing these projects succeed. Could be good news?

Re:Hot Button Topic

[excyl]

That's true. The flurry of rants and rumors that /. has been covering could just be the indications of natural growing pains in these huge community projects. It's definitely great to have more people concerned about the quality and future of these FOSS projects, but let's just hope that the net influence of the advocates, user, and developers on the software is positive.

I'm not a casual reader, and I don't believe that there is an actual movement that could be dying. I was merely trying to show that the purely /. side of things (the news posts) seems overly suggestive of problems in some grand movement that is on the brink of a great collapse. Choice and competition are good, but loyal users, advocates, and developers tend to get very defensive or adamant when talk concerns forks and the like.

I've gotten the impression over the last few days of /. being more of a volatile rumor/rant site and not really a site dedicated to collecting important news.

In the case of Mozilla, I think that mods and submitters probably should have waited until real changes and anouncements were made. These rants and such could easily be footnotes to the news.

Re:Hot Button Topic

[McGarnacle]

That's true. The flurry of rants and rumors that /. has been covering could just be the indications of natural growing pains in these huge community projects.

That's the impression I got after reading through the thread on the gnome-devel mailing list, which is apparently what this is all about.

Seems like the gnome developers *want* to communicate through open channels, and thus maintain a level of open development, but are having a hard time hearing themselves and each other think with all the noise from "enthuisiasts" on what is supposed to be a list about development. So yeah. Maybe this is indicative of a growing community and associated growing pains. Or maybe, as has been suggested, it's an example of one person attention-whoring. Maybe it's both.

I've gotten the impression over the last few days of /. being more of a volatile rumor/rant site and not really a site dedicated to collecting important news.

<cliche>You must be new here</cliche>

"GNOME Ignoring its Own Users?"

[Anonymous Coward]

All of us? Well I'm gonna e-mail the other three, and we'll make GNOME pay attention to us!

Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[SCHecklerX]

I'm getting annoyed at the current trend too. It's becoming increasingly difficult to have my environment behave the way that *I* want it to. Why do we need all of this stuff anyway? Isn't a standard Xdnd and current IPC enough to properly integrate pretty much anything without depending on a bunch of crap like 'gnome-settings-daemon' running?

I digress, the above is a slightly different rant. Not all user stuff is bad. I have sent MANY suggestions to the ROX team, and they have all made it into the software. ROX now depends on the stuff ranted about in the first paragraph, however :(

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[Lisandro]

There's options, you know. XFCE 4 is a "Gnome-lite" desktop enviroment, but i find it more confortable to use than Gnome itself, never mind much, much, MUCH more bloatless. It's been my desktop of choice for a year now, and i don't see myself going back.

Gnome is nice, but (atleast in this particular topic), Eugenia has a point. We keep hearing how Gnome focuses on usability and user-friendliness and then they come up with stuff like those awful file dialogs, or the damn bloat, which makes the system crawl running a few apps.

I haven't tried Gnome for a couple of version revisions now, but XFCE gives me what i want and does the job fine.

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[m50d]

If you'd tried to implement xdnd you'd know the answer to that. It's horrible. And basic IPC is too limited. Gnome-settings-daemon, though, is solving a problem that doesn't exist, basically letting you store settings in a registry rather than a config file (after the amount we moan about the windows registry, you'd think they'd realise it's a bad idea, but no).

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[Taladar]

And I thought I was alone with my opinion that I don't want to have half a dozen support-daemons running for my desktop. I simply want to install single programs and to uninstall the ones I don't like. Gtk or Qt are okay, but anything KDE and Gnome build above it is simply a bunch of crap and bloat if you don't use at least a dozen of their programs. I believe I don't even have a dozen X11 programs installed, more like half of it: aterm, opera, mplayer, xpdf, feh and 2 or 3 games. I don't want to install a whole bunch of crap just to use let us say k3b or some similar independent gnome program.

And don't start with the "libraries safe us so much trouble and work" crap. I know that libraries can safe you trouble, but why not use one or more of ten small libraries instead of one big pile that depends on lots of other libs from the "project" even though the functions my small app uses is not related to the functions those libraries provide in any way.

Unix started as small, independent programs working together, not one big pile of heavily interlinked crap. If I want to mount ftp-servers in my file-manager I do that with a kernel filesystem, it doesn't have to be built into the file manager which shouldn't even be aware it is accessing a remote file.

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[rhavyn]

Except it isn't a registry, it's a bunch of XML files. You'd think the number of times people have been told that people would stop saying it's like the registry. But no.

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[rhavyn]

Then don't use a full blown desktop environment. And, if you really dig into them, Windows, Mac, BeOS, etc all have more or less the same background programs running. Their process managers just normally either don't display them or they have strange names that don't describe what they're doing.

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[Curtman]

much, much, MUCH more bloatless.

Is that sort of like being less bloated?

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[Lisandro]

Yes, but with a twist. Ba-bing!

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[Taladar]

Config files are one of the things I like most in Linux compared to Windows. If it is a registry or just looks like the Windows registry isn't important. I want simple config-files I can copy from one machine to another to move my settings. I want config files to use configurations from Websites, Forums,...

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[mrchaotica]

I'm getting annoyed at the current trend too. It's becoming increasingly difficult to have my environment behave the way that *I* want it to. Why do we need all of this stuff anyway? Isn't a standard Xdnd and current IPC enough to properly integrate pretty much anything without depending on a bunch of crap like 'gnome-settings-daemon' running?

That's an important rant, though. I feel the same way about stuff like Kparts. Why can't they just let Freedesktop.org deal with infrastructure, and let stuff standardize for a change?!

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[rhavyn]

Then you'll be happy to know that gconf keeps everything in config files and you can copy those files from machine to machine. And it doesn't look anything like the Windows registry. gconf-editor might look like regedit, but they are both front ends to completely 100% different configuration implementations.

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[Eric Smith]

those awful file dialogs,

Gotta agree, the file dialogs in 2.8 are absolutely awful. I haven't seen 2.10 yet.

If it at least remembered the state of "browse for other folders", so I didn't have to click that nearly every time I use a file dialog, I would be much happier.

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps MS and Apple are secretly paying developers to intentionally bloat, crash and otherwise undermine Linux desktop development.

You gotta ask yourself, who's got the most to lose in a Linux desktop world?

Think about it.

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[Create an Account]

Is that sort of like being less bloated?

More like much, much, MUCH less bloated.

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[Anonymous Coward]

That'll never happen. I had a Gnome dev tell me that I was stupid for wanting that, and that their interface component knew more about where I should save stuff (i.e: always in my home directory, nowhere else) than I did.

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[Eric Smith]

Usually (but not always) I *do* want to load or save from somewhere in my home directory. The key point being *somewhere*. My home directory contains a hierarchy of thousands of subdirectories. Having to click an extra button to get a reasonable hierarchy browser really sucks, especially since the old dialog did it by default.

I don't have a problem with encouraging naive users to put things in their home directory; that is a good thing. But catering to naive users shouldn't be done to the point of making things much harder for more sophisticated users.

One extra click might not seem like much, but when you have to do it over and over and over...

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[m50d]

But the way you are meant to access it is just like the registry. It works just like the registry. If applications were encouraged to access it by directly read/writing the xml files you would have a point, but they're not.

MS has moved the registry before (it's stored very differently in 3.1 and 9x, and differently again in the NT line), they could move it to XML and it would still be the registry we all know and hate.

If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck....

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[rhavyn]

You really don't know what you're talking about. If you wanted to read and write the files directly there is nothing in the world stopping. Modifying the settings through the gconf API allows gconf to send notifications to apps that their settings changed. This way the application can modify it's behavior immediately even if you don't modify the setting through it's own configuration panel. It's called a convenience library. You can, for all intents and purposes, treat the gconf XML files exactly like any normal config file and everything will work just like normal. Editing it by hand, copying it to another system ... all of that works.

According to your specs anything which doesn't read and write config files by directly doing low level file manipulations uses a registry.

This has been gone over repeatedly and I really don't understand why people like you can't get it through their heads that it's not a registry, it doesn't work like the registry, it doesn't have the problems the registry has.

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[m50d]

Any configuration system which is used by many different apps and requires something beyond the standard C libraries to access is a registry in my book and subject to the same problems. XML is at least plain text, but it's still not very human-modifiable (too much redundant typing of the horrible angle bracket characters). Still at least you can still diff it. Anyway, the reason that the registry was such a problem is that having apps go through an api to read/write their config is an inherently bad idea. If apps do their files directly then you don't have the problems of the registry, but in that case what's the point of gconf-settings-daemon?

Re:Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers

[SCHecklerX]

See above. I personally run windowmaker + ROX. The problem is the apps. Even firefox now depends on xsettings to properly render its menu fonts.

Before the flaming starts

[Anonymous Coward]

I think both editorials have a point but both are also unfair to the developers (especially Eugenias rant).

I think the problem is not that the devs don't care about what the users want, but that there today is no working infrastracture making it possible for the users to give feedback to the developers in a meaningful (for the developers) way.

Anyway, before the flaming starts, read the relevant mailing list thread here:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-deve l-list/ 2005-March/thread.html
(roadmap status update/update request)
and you might get an idea why some developers didn't react to kind to Eugenias contributions. (To put it short, she acts incredibly annoying)

hmm

[dotslasher_sri]

Now GNOME developers cannot implement features requested by all users. No one does that!. not even microsoft. If a feature is asked widely enough and it seems interesting i think the developers would implement them. I know somewhere in the mailing list someone said "a feature will be implemented only if the developers want to implement it" but i dont think they mean it that way . Probably what they mean the idea should be interesting enough to one of the developers too and should be worth it. Imagien a groups of people asking for clippy now would any dev want to implement it just because people asked for it ?

In other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

..probably a few people made suggestions that either got shot down or hasnt been gotten to yet so they decided to pitch a hissy fit that Gnome doesnt listen to users.

There is only so many hours in the day folks and hundreds if not thousands of other people making suggestions. They cant wiggle their nose and flick the magic OSS wand and stick in every single requested feature in an isntant.

Accept the fact that either
a) Its on the to-do list
or
b) Your idea was stupid!

If only this was K5...

[m50d]

because the story so obviously belongs at -1, Troll

Re:If only this was K5...

[Anonymous Coward]

because the story so obviously belongs at -1, Troll

"Slashdot Ignoring its Own Users"

Users say they want news items that aren't trolls or flamebait.

Re:If only this was K5...

[m50d]

I think slashdotters enjoy them to a certain extent, is the sad thing. And you missed out all the dupes.

WE ARE NOT IGNORING OUR USERS!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you are. I believe that--

No, we're not!

But don't you think that--

No, we're not!

Please let me--

We are not ignoring our users!!!

Even when you--

No!!! No no!!!

Wouldn't you agree that--

Lalalalalala!!!!!!

*sigh* Those damn gnomes, goblins and other creatures... Seriously, what did we expect?

Re:WE ARE NOT IGNORING OUR USERS!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome == troll ?

kobold, elf, orc, dwarf, gremlin, pixie, fairy, sprite, nymph, sylph, errr...

Re:WE ARE NOT IGNORING OUR USERS!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

so is slyphseed gnome cum??

They're just being smart.

[k96822]

The developers are just being smart. If they were to implement every little thing every little user wanted, it would bloat. There's plenty of examples of where that happens -- take Java, for example. Just because the GNOME team may not send flowers and a thank you card to each person doesn't mean they aren't listening. It is that they have decided those ideas they aren't implementing aren't something they want to use.

Re:They're just being smart.

[Quattro Vezina]

The developers are just being smart. If they were to implement every little thing every little user wanted, it would bloat.

*sigh*

Feature bloat is a good thing, dammit.

Re:They're just being smart.

[m50d]

No, but they could make it appear more like they care, and actually ask the users occasionally. Sure they can't fix everything, but when they're implementing new features, and have a variety of ideas, how would it hurt them to ask the users which to do first?

Re:They're just being smart.

[k96822]

I strongly disagree. *sigh* The more complex a system becomes, the less usable it becomes.

Re:They're just being smart.

[k96822]

You're right; that couldn't hurt.

Re:Record

[Entropy_ah]

Impossible as that would imply that people are reading the article before posting.

Why not..

[Anonymous Coward]

use KDE if GNOME isn't responsive to your feedback?

ps

I've never used KDE or GNOME. Which is strange since I've been using Linux (slackware) before Kernel 1.0.

-1, Trollbait.

[Nosf3ratu]

nt

GNOME is bloated

[erroneus]

Well, Okay, I'll requalify that statement with "GNOME's Nautilus is bloated." I know I am not the only one with this problem and it hasn't been addressed since people started saying it. Instead, over the months and years, it seems to have gotten worse. The only way to restore boot-fresh performance is to "killall nautilus" and let it start again.

What I'd like to see is a file manager that is more like (and I hate to say this) Microsoft's Explorer. It's faster and doesn't seem to suffer from what I believe to be memory leaks. (Nautilus over time seems to eat up memory until you kill it.) I do tweak Nautilus to turn off all or as many frills as possible but that only extends life a little longer.

And if it's helpful to know, I use FC3 and keep it as stock and up-to-date as possible.

Are there any drop-in-replacements for Nautilus that solves my issues?

Re:GNOME is bloated

[goodster]

I hear Konqueror is pretty slick. :)

*ducks*

Re:GNOME is bloated

[spankers]

You may want to try xffm from the Xfce4 desktop environment... or just completely ditch GNOME for Xfce4.2 as I did.

http://www.xfce.org/

Re:GNOME is bloated

[ErichTheWebGuy]

Are there any drop-in-replacements for Nautilus that solves my issues?

Yup. Konqueror is exactly what you describe.

Re:GNOME is bloated

[Anonymous Coward]

Though the interface is nothing like Explorer's, ROX is quite a bit lighter than Nautilus.
It uses GTK2, optionally manages icons on your desktop, has a host of software which was designed for use with it, and (imo) is quite easy to use.

Obvious already

[m50d]

The shipping of spatial nautilus, and the reversed confirmation dialog, both with no way to turn them off (yes this was corrected in the next .z release, but really, it should never have been shipped like that), should have made this clear to everyone.

Sounds like apple...

[nixfixer]

Sounds like apple. The elitist "we know better what users need in a GUI".

Though they probably do.

Re:Record

[Phydeaux314]

Sssh! That's the great slashdot secret!

mnb Re:This has been happening for a while

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been going on for quite some time.

-1 flamebait

...people who are fed up started their own Gnome branch, GoneMe...

-0 true enough

...that fixes the things they think are wrong with Gnome.

+1 funny

Uh, what exactly has the project fixed? What exactly has the project released?

Use Eclipse as a Model

[H0p313ss]

The Eclipse project actively encourages its users and clients to log bugs and change requests as well as vote and comment on them through their Bugzilla.

IIRC, this concept was encouraged by ERS in Cathedral... It would be nice to see other mainstream OSS projects such as GNOME actively embrace this model of community involvement.

That being said, I think GNOME has done some wonderful things in the past, and as far as I'm concerned the desktop improves with every release, keep up the good work!

Re:Use Eclipse as a Model

[ajs]

The Eclipse project actively encourages its users and clients to log bugs and change requests as well as vote and comment on them through their Bugzilla.

IIRC, this concept was encouraged by ERS [sic] in Cathedral... It would be nice to see other mainstream OSS projects such as GNOME actively embrace this model of community involvement.

Yeah, that would be nice... if only there were a Gnome Bugzilla with some way of tracking the most frequently reported concerns.... hmmm.

Re:Use Eclipse as a Model

[brunes69]

IIRC, this concept was encouraged by ERS in Cathedral... It would be nice to see other mainstream OSS projects such as GNOME actively embrace this model of community involvement.

KDE has always adopted this model. If there is something you don't like about KDE, log it at bugs.kde.org as a wishlist item, and vote it up.

Note that this is no guarantee that the wish will be taken care of right now, or if it will even be done at all (silly wishes are closed), but reasonable wishes remain open, and wishes that are voted up are more likely to be implemented faster.

Re:Use Eclipse as a Model

[Rahga]

"The Eclipse [eclipse.org] project actively encourages its users and clients to log bugs and change requests as well as vote and comment on them through their Bugzilla. [eclipse.org]"

Perhaps you didn't read Eugenia's original post to desktop-devel-list... no shame in that. She neglected to link to it in her own article, which suggests at least a modicum of shame (though not enough to stop her from posting the article). It says, and I quote:

I currently have 20 feature requests for Gnome 2.1. Where should I place them? The Bugzilla is not where I want to place them because:
a. no one will pay attention ultimately (gazillion of feature requests never go anywhere there, let along bug reports)
b. I don't want to spend half an hour placing 20 features requests on the bugzilla one by one.

Her first point is bogus... I'm with many other volunteers in traiging GNOME Bugzilla regularly, and have worked on many enhancements myself.

Her second point... She is too lazy to file enhancements at bugzilla. However, she's got plenty of energy to send e-mail using Microsoft Outlook to a GNOME developer's mailing list, then write the article at OSNews.

Yes, GNOME encourages people to file enhancements at Bugzilla. Eugenia, however, rejects this, then says GNOME Developers doesn't listen to users.

Re:Use Eclipse as a Model

[QuantumG]

She also chooses not to pay anyone to care about her feature requests (like, say, a commercial Linux distribution would.)

Something in the water?

[LiquidCoooled]

Everyone seems to be bitching and complaining about something at the moment.

From Mozilla to Gnome to the slashdot readership.

Make the most of the time you got here instead of worrying about free software. If it works, great, if not, do something constructive to make it better.

Go play games, relax, spend time with your partner, just do something you enjoy doing :)

Those of you without women, make sure you keep tissues handy.

[turning 30 has made me reflective]

Re:Something in the water?

[m50d]

Many people enjoy complaining. A good sensible debate is always fun, and a flamewar is also fun provided you don't take it too personally. As someone said in the last mozilla thread, it proves that people care, which is very importang.

Re:Something in the water?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a sucky post.

Developers developing for themselves

[DARKFORCE123]

These days its automatically assumed that if you're developing open source, its for the huge community of users out there that are NOW starting to come to your platform. Despite wanting more applications that fulfill needs for the majority of people out there, why does it seem like there is this attitude that these open source developers HAVE TO DO it. They are not blind fools out to serve the masses. I assume a large portion of them develop specific components to be noticed so that they can get a job in the industry. Sure they want to promote open source but they're not going to like it if people say develop these features , and he/she doesn't want to .

Now we're getting more people who just want clones of Windows and Windows applications and want those tools to be free.

Open source is not just about developing free stuff. Its its own self-fullfilling serving product life cycle where not only you but someone else can keep adding onto the product and its open for anyone to modify.

Open source does not mean things have to be FREE in the monetary sense. Not even in the FREE FREE sense if its developed with some other open license than the GPL.

Its also the choice of open source developers on whether they want to be business oriented always taking feedback from users or just doing what they want. However if you don't pay for it, you really have no right to complain about when Developer X doesn't do something.

Who has the momentum, Gnome or KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

A genuine question here: Which desktop environment has the momentum today? I personally am a KDE user. It feels better-integrated to me, more like the Mac way of doing a desktop. But of course I feel that way because I use KDE. But I'm curious what the concensus is? Or are we going to continue forever with two desktops? Would Gnome have any momentum if it weren't for Redhat?

Re:Who has the momentum, Gnome or KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE has had the momentum ever since their 1.0 release, which was before Gnome's 1.0 release and as a bonus substantially worked. Gnome has been struggling to remain relevant ever since, with commercial interest from Red Hat and Sun being the only reason the project is still alive.

Gnome 2.10 is great

[Anonymous Coward]

While they might need a new way to choose new features, I can't think of anything they didn't touch (and improve) in this release. Yes, minor things mostly, but that's what gives it polish. If Eugina (`f-serin) doesn't like it there are plenty of other WMs out there.

CBW#$
http://lefttochance.com/ - why not, I could be right...

No that would be

[Anonymous Coward]

The Lying Gnome...

]rimshot[

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

99% of World's Users Ignoring Gnome.

users are dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone with a clue knows that the typical user these days is a moron and should be completely ignored... i commend gnome for realizing this and shun slashdot for posting this useless story. Slashdot - you guys are losin your touch...

Call me an idiot...

[Anita Coney]

... well, mostly because I am one, but I was perplexed why anyone would disagree with the following statement:

"A feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it"

Why should someone be compelled to develop software he doesn't want to develop? When you're forced to do something you don't want to do, that's called work, not a hobby. That isn't what open source is about.

If you want a feature put in an open source product, either do it yourself, wait for someone to do it, or pay someone to do it for you. But never ever ever expect someone to do it for you for free.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[nine-times]

"Oh, don't complain about open source software-- it's just some guy's hobby..."

Way to talk all the CIOs/CFOs around the world out of using FOSS for anything ever.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[Anita Coney]

I guess you didn't read the article. The part I quoted came from "Gnome developers who don't work for a Gnome-related corporation."

Since these guys do not work for a Gnome-related corporation, but yet they are still working on Gnome, I think it's reasonable to assume they are doing it as a hobby.

If I'm wrong about that, please set me straight.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[Anonymous Coward]

I must have missed something.

Can you tell me why I should care about some rich three letter a-hole using Free OSS, allowing him to line his pockets with even more cash, while contributing nothing back to the community?

please, do tell.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[Taladar]

Why? They know if they want something not yet existing they have to pay for it. If they are smart they recognize the advantage building on top of an open source code base instead of starting from scratch can bring. They usually don't expect anything to be free.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[Wile_E_Peyote]

Why should someone be compelled to develop software he doesn't want to develop? When you're forced to do something you don't want to do, that's called work, not a hobby. That isn't what open source is about.

If you want a feature put in an open source product, either do it yourself, wait for someone to do it, or pay someone to do it for you. But never ever ever expect someone to do it for you for free.

This is why I bought my operating system...

Re:Call me an idiot...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure your vedor implents every feature you request right along! Now pay for the next version sucker.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[Fizzl]

For what?
Why?
What the hell?

Drop this shit. If the enterprise you work for wants to use Solaris on SUN hardware or Irix on IBM or Tsunamix on FuckStorm, what the hell do you care?

Why would anyone be compelled to 'talk peple into' using Linux or any other piece of open source? If they got the buckets of money to pay for hardware, software and suport, why not?

For my applications OSS apps are pretty much what I need and I do not need support.
The cost of operation is perfect.
The fact that I can modify the source and recompile for my flavour of binary is just icing on the cake for me. And I'm pretty fucking technical person.

If I see a problem, I can file a bug report and/or fix the problem myself. What if I don't fix it myself? Will it be fixed some day?
Is there a way to escalate my problem with money? No? "So, have someone in our organization fix it!" -- "But we don't have such organization to fix 3rd party software" -- "Start one" -- "What about the legal issues" -- "Let's get a team of fuckward moneyhovering asshole lawyers involved in writing complex guidelines of writing the code".. etc..
Wait... This turned into a huge rant. Nevermind ;P

Guess once how much the VP's, CIO's or FuckMeOoo's care about modifying or recompiling of "guaranteed" and supported software.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[nine-times]

Since these guys do not work for a Gnome-related corporation, but yet they are still working on Gnome, I think it's reasonable to assume they are doing it as a hobby.

Ok, so he's doing it as a hobby. And what, exactly, is his hobby? Contributing to a non-hobby project run by "the Gnome Foundation".

Re:Call me an idiot...

[lubricated]

don't complain about propriatary software, Micrsoft is just out to make money.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[nine-times]

How about because a whole lot of money that does pay for FOSS comes, in a round-about way, from these rich three letter a-holes.

Don't let the "free" part of "FOSS" fool you-- there's a lot of money being spent. Where's the money going? Companies like Novell and Redhat and IBM, who are building their businesses on FOSS. And what do they do with the money? They spend a lot of money to pay programmers to develop FOSS full-time and spend money on projects that they think will help their business. And why do they do it? They expect a return on their investment.

There's this big myth that Redhat, Novell, and IBM don't "contribute anything back to the community" and it's just utterly false.

If you really think all these FOSS projects you're enjoying would do so well without corporate sponsorship, then go ahead and stop using any software that's benefited from corporate money. Oops, there goes Gnome, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, KDE, and, while we're at it, the Linux kernel itself.

So yeah, have fun with that.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[nine-times]

Maybe some what I said doesn't apply to you. Maybe you don't care about the success of FOSS in general. Maybe you don't like when large companies spend money to open-source development. My bad.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[nine-times]

Yeah, well guess what, the desire to make money is often what drives proprietary software developers to address their users wants and needs, which is part of the reason why users like proprietary software.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[trynis]

"A feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it"

Why should someone be compelled to develop software he doesn't want to develop? When you're forced to do something you don't want to do, that's called work, not a hobby.

But the thing is we can affect what the developers want by giving input, and that's what the discussion is about. It seems to me that parts of the GNOME development team don't even want users to give input. From personal experience I know that knowing what the users want most makes me want to work on exactly that. IMHO not letting users vote for feature requests on bugzilla removes motivation from developers.

It's all about affecting what the developers want. No one wants to force anyone to do anything.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[neutralstone]

I was perplexed why anyone would disagree with the following statement: "A feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it"

Because the statement was made within the context of a project that purports to have a 'users first' philosophy . The statement you quoted indicates more of a 'developers first' philosophy. So I guess the whole article boils down to a claim of false advertising.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[DShard]

Since I am one of the he's I can safely answer that I am working on gnome in _my_ spare time. I spend it trying to understanding the system I use daily, for work and home, and making improvements where I see fit that are compatible with the project. I don't get paid for it. I would consider it a hobby.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[eraserewind]

The point is that unless you are willing to pay for it, don't expect any features that you want developed. I'm sure most CIOs/CFOs can understand that perfectly.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[Narchie Troll]

Why should we care whether CIOs and CFOs use FOSS for anything ever?

Re:Call me an idiot...

[nine-times]

If you want to know my answer (which I'm assuming you do, since you asked), I guess I'll have to suggest you read my reply to your sibling post, who asked essentially the same thing.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[Narchie Troll]

I don't get it. If there's such a problem with CIOs and CFOs and FOSS, why do we have all of those corporate-funded projects you mention? (The majority of which, by the way, I don't use.)

Re:Call me an idiot...

[nine-times]

...because people have convinced the CIOs and CFOs that FOSS is serious software for use in professional settings? I was trying to point out that it might not be so good for the community to go around convincing everyone that open-source development is only good for hobby projects, since a whole lot of funding comes from these businesses who "don't give anything back to the community".

Re:Call me an idiot...

[Anonymous Coward]

When you're forced to do something you don't want to do, that's called work, not a hobby. That isn't what open source is about.

No, that isn't what Free Software is about. Open Source has always been about improving the effectiveness of software development through community participation.

Re:Call me an idiot...

[lubricated]

> the desire to make money is often what drives proprietary software developers to address their users wants and needs

but also, the desire to make money is often what drives proprietary software developers to not address users wants and needs. For example, microsoft claiming that fixing bugs is not profitable.

Case in point: Spatial Nautilus

[Raul Acevedo]

Note: I've been using GNOME since 0.30, so I have a certain sense of loyalty to it.

A case in point was the whole debacle over what was hailed as a great, new achievement in usability for Nautilus: the spatial metaphor.

What a disaster. It was amazing to me that it took a whole month or two of users complaining and bitching left and right, before the developers decided to add the ability to easily disable spatial mode. Agreed, they finally added it, but it was like pulling teeth. The "we developers know better than the users" attitude was very stricking.

I don't care whether you prefer spatial or not, the merits of spatial are a separate argument. But so many people complained about it, so vehemently, that it's amazing it took more than say a few days before they patched a simple menu accessible toggle. Today you will still get people saying stupid things like "well you could always disable it in gconf". Sigh.

Re:Case in point: Spatial Nautilus

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't Spatial Nautilus one of the features that Eugenia wanted them to put in a while back?

Re: Case in point: Spatial Nautilus

[gidds]

Is this the same 'spatial metaphor' that's been an integral part of the 'classic' Mac OS for the last 20 years?

If so, then I can see why its addition wasn't popular. IME, people who started off using Mac OS Classic tend to love it, and miss it on anything else. But people who started on any other graphical OS (like myself) tend to hate it. (I found myself battling against Mac OS 9 constantly for the year or so I used it, and found even the public beta of Mac OS X a breath of fresh air. I found even the Windows GUI more comfortable, and really missed MagiC which was my main OS before going Mac.)

Re:Case in point: Spatial Nautilus

[syncomm]

"Spatial file management" was really great and exactly what I wanted... back when I had an Amiga 500. :)

What someone really needs to think about is how to arrange the million plus files I have in a non-tree format where I can easily locate related content. Too many times have I arranged my directories thoughfully only to notice that a particular file required multiple distinctions or needed to be uselessly symlinked in a few different places so I could make coherant catagories or perform simple searches by different attributes.

Re:Case in point: Spatial Nautilus

[donscarletti]

I complained about spatial nautilus fairly heavily when it was announced. I hated it to begin with, but then I started using it, and it really turned out to work very well. I think a lot of people are turned off it because they have used it before in windows 95 and basically don't want a bar of it now, nomatter how well it works. Now I'll agree that listening to users is usually a good thing, but this was a case where what the users had to say was nothing but inaccurate prejudice. I'm glad that the people in charge were able to ignore my opinion and bring me something better than what I wanted.

Now something I really don't like is that aweful new file chooser.

Re:Case in point: Spatial Nautilus

[Anonymous Coward]

ROX blows Gnome file manager out of the water.

Re:Case in point: Spatial Nautilus

[k8to]

I strongly believe that this is the case where listening to your users results in inferior software. Users disliked spatial because it is not what they are used to, not because it's actually worse. Spatial has significant advantages over the necessary clutter that "browser" file managers must acrrue to offer the same kinds of functionality that spatial file managers offer by default.

However, the user base has calcified around the windows way of accessing their files, and is uninterested in returning to the superior macintosh paradigm. The Gnome developers caved, and as in so many other areas of their UI, have defaulted to apeing Microsoft.

They may end up with more users, but whether Gnome will be better off for it in the long run only time will tell.

Before the flames begin...

[nine-times]

I know this whole topic is bound to turn into a wild flame-fest, people on both sides, either honest misunderstanding or through malice, misrepresenting the other's opinions. However, I'd first like to say that this raises an interesting question that I've had in mind for quite a long time:

What is an open-source developer's responsibility to his users?

I mean, sure, there are instances where someone might through together a little tool for himself, and open-source it just in case someone else might have a use, in which case I'd say his responsibility is practically zero.

However, the matter seems different to me when you have these relatively large foundations running major projects that are used in a large percentage of available distributions. Imagine FOSS does take over the world someday, and the Linux/Gnome combination accounts for a large percentage of the desktop market-share, what then? Let's pretend 90% of desktop users are dependent on Gnome to get things done-- do we still say that Gnome developers have no responsibility to address the needs of Gnome users?

If the Gnome development community would say yes, I'd probably hope that someone fork the project ASAP, someone who is willing to take responsibility for being user-centric. That goes for any major project. As a bit of an open-source advocate, I hope developers of major projects are always keeping their users in mind. If not, I'll have to go back to advocating closed-source proprietary companies insofar as they recognize "users" to be an important part of the equation, and not just "that annoying whining sound".

Re:Before the flames begin...

[Anonymous Coward]

do we still say that Gnome developers have no responsibility to address the needs of Gnome users?

Yes.

Re:Before the flames begin...

[tedrlord]

Here's the thing, though. These people are coding this on their own free time, for their own enjoyment. A lot of them are programmers for a living, forced to write things a particular way all day. Open source is a way to vent their frustration and express their creativity. They can be as elegant as they want. They don't worry about the old feeping creatures. It's their code.

How many people want to come home after work every day to emails from Gnome, telling them to do more coding they don't enjoy? Especially if those people have friends, families, or other concerns? What the article proposes is turning a hobby these people do for their own fulfillment into an unpaid job. How many programmers would the community lose?

Re:Before the flames begin...

[nine-times]

Here's the thing, though. These people are coding this on their own free time, for their own enjoyment.

And I would say that, insofar as Gnome (or whatever OSS you want to talk about) is a hobby project run by developers who don't care about the needs of their users, I would be concerned about relying on it or advising others to rely on it. If you had developers who were willing to work against the best interests of the users for the sake of the fun of writing "elegant code", I think users should run for cover.

However, I don't believe that's the case. I think even the hobbyists [generally] are interested in making good tools for users. I think many of the developers must understand that an "elegant" solution isn't elegant if it doesn't solve a problem. I think part of what makes programmers enjoy this "hobby" rather than the programming they do at work is that the product is something they can feel proud of. And what's my evidence that many Gnome developers are user-centric? Well, just look at Gnome. It's really too good and user-friendly to be a mere geek-scratching-an-itch project.

Insofar as developers fail to address the needs of the users, I believe the real problem (most of the time) is that they fail to anticipate and understand the needs of the users, which more often than not comes from a failure to listen to the users, which is what this whole discussion is really about.

And let's not forget that there really are people who work on OSS for a living. Just because it's free doesn't mean it's all hobbyists.

Re:Before the flames begin...

[tedrlord]

Well I don't think that Gnome is ignoring users' needs. It's just that they have their own design for the user interface, and don't feel like they need to change that because particular users want certain things.

As they said, "a feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer that wants to implement it." They might, in fact, add the requested feature if they want to do so, but they won't if they don't like the idea. They're not beholden to the users, like they might be if they were being paid.

I'm not including those that work on OSS for a living. User interface design is a perfect example of why paid open source developers are needed. Distributed development makes for a solid base, but corporate backing is the best way toward a slick interface.

Inexcusable

[Pan T. Hose]

Ignoring their users? That is completely inexcusable. If I was one of their paying customers I would certainly--oh, wait a minute... Maybe those users should just stop bitching when they get something for free? Fork up or shut up, that's just how free software works, you know. Do you want anything changed? I am sure that the developer whom you have hired to add your features will do it in no time. Oh, you don't want to pay any money? Tough luck then, because GNU is free as in freedom, not free as in cheap-ass-users-love-to-bitch-and-moan. Welcome to the Real World.

Re:Inexcusable

[Sheetrock]

It really is incredible. Who knew that getting something for nothing would be such a raw deal, unless the something was herpes?

Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[deacon]

I mean, really, WTF is wrong with some people?

The Gnome developers have slaved away for years to GIVE us a really nice desktop environment.

Yet, some people have decided that isn't good enough, and want the Gnome developers to become personal servants to fulfill their whims and fancies.

We should be thanking the Gnome developers, not whining that they don't cater to our personal brain-fart of the day. An easy alternative for them is to not provide Gnome at all.

So stop whining and STFU.

Oh, ya, I am not a software developer of any kind. But if I gave away some sort of widget I made, and people whined that this free widget should be pink not purple, I would tell them to FO.

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[haxmtrx]

right on! couldn't have said it better myself.

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[Twanfox]

Developers that do as you suggest and give a big 'f u' to the users of their program generally have their programs dropped like a bad habit due to the feeling of rudeness by the user.

While yes, as an open source developer working in your spare time on a project, you have every right to say that, or say "There's the source code, you do it yourself". However, you paint yourself as rude, obnoxious, arrogant, and contrary to the general goal of developing for the public: getting the public to use what you've developed.

Why should I, the user, use something that I consider broken and buggy, especially if it isn't necessary for me to work?

Why should I, the user, put up with bs from open source developers that are generally obnoxious and rude when I make a suggestion? (note here: making a suggestion and having it explained to me why that is bad is not what is being refered to here. What is being refered to is being told off, ignored (if this is a bug report), or to receive a snobby reply of "I don't feel like it")

Oh, and I am a software developer, hobbyist like many open source developers. Being rude to people who like your stuff enough to provide feedback is a good way to show yourself as the tard you are.

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of being a blowhard in your response to a person, why not just remind them in a friendly way that they are free to modify it themselves to their liking. You could also provide them some ideas on how to achieve this if you were to do it yourself. Initially ignoring someone or telling them to shut the fuck up and to fuck off is no way to encourage someone to become actively involved in the development process of a project. The only thing it achieves is that it makes you look like a total dickhead.

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[nine-times]

The Gnome developers have slaved away for years to GIVE us a really nice desktop environment.

Yet, some people have decided that isn't good enough, and want the Gnome developers to become personal servants to fulfill their whims and fancies.

Yeah, that reasoning might have worked if their front page had been a disclaimer like: This is just my hobby. Don't rely on it.

However, the Gnome foundation has partnered up with other OSS products and developers, and the developers have been pushing to be taken seriously as a real DE fit for general use. They've encouraged other developers to use their DE as a platform, and generally acted as though they they don't intend their project to be some hobby software for their own use, but that they want people to use it. They've even marketed themselves as being the most user-friendly and user-centric DE for unix-like systems.

So, OSS foundations, don't promote your project that way unless you want users to expect you to pay attention to them. Developers, don't participate in projects of that sort if you can't handle users wanting the project to be useful. In the most general terms I can think of, don't publish your work on the internet if you can't handle criticism.

I mean, what if, in response to the impending flames this post will receive, I wrote, "I just wrote this for free! How dare you publicly disagree when I spent my own free time slaving away typing up clever little articles of writing, and GAVE them to you!" Wouldn't that be a little silly? I mean, I posted it for you to read of my own free will, in a forum that allows for responses. What should I expect?

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[Anonymous Coward]

Well written..

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of what you said is true but it is not black and white.

In general, the maximum rudeness tolerance that people allow you is proportional to the coolness of your project.

If you get excessively rude, or if your project starts to stink, your userbase will either find an alternative or fork your project. A good example is the XFree86 vs X.org fiasco.

In this particular case with Gnome, I think the rants are fairly unjustified. Yes there are bugs and nuisances in Gnome. Some of them are being worked on. Some of them are backburnered. But the same goes for many programs on Windows and even a few on OS X.

Gnome programmers who are paid, are paid by their companies to work on specific sets of features. Gnome developers who are volunteers work on things that they find cool and take personal interest in. Why would someone, for example, work on a shitty piece of code, one that they never use, *for free* just because someone bitched at them? Where's the incentive?

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[arose]

Let me quote from the GPL:

11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.

12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[FooBarWidget]

So complain to the GNOME foundation or RedHat or Novell or whatever. Stop generalizing things to "open source developers". I never advertised MY projects as "enterprise-level products".

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[nine-times]

Like I said in my first line, "that reasoning might have worked if their front page had been a disclaimer like: This is just my hobby. Don't rely on it."

Really what I'm questioning is whether a software developer can shirk his responsibilities to his users on the basis of the software being open-sourced. You could be a closed source developer, write a program, and expressly state, "This is my hobby, don't rely on it." Or you could claim that it's an enterprise-level product.

I'm not sure the openness of the code should have anything to do with it.

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[tedrlord]

We're not talking about whether Gnome can handle the criticism, though. The issue is whether or not they are beholden to their users.

The general argument here is that since the users aren't paying them, they have no responsibility to implement their ideas. Personally, I think that's a good thing, because it means that Gnome is free to pursue what it feels is the best design, rather than whatever features are popular at the moment. And if Gnome's design views differ from the users', they don't have to use it.

When you can try it for free, there's little reason to complain that the product didn't meet your expectations.

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME is LGPL dumbass. But yes they promote GNOME as a coporate desktop but offer halfassed crap.

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[arose]

I'm sure LGPL has the same provisions, nevermind that not all of Gnome is LGPLed. Your post has more crap than Gnome (and it's tiny).

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[corblix]

... if I gave away some sort of widget I made, and people whined that this free widget should be pink not purple, I would tell them to FO.

What if you told people it would be pink, but it actually turned out to be purple?

This particular criticism says that the Gnome developers are not following their own stated philosophy. Such criticisms cannot be rejected out of hand, simply because the software is free.

By the way, there are other reasons to reject these particular criticisms of this particular project. Still I think the points in the parent article are not valid.

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[nine-times]

We're not talking about whether Gnome can handle the criticism, though. The issue is whether or not they are beholden to their users.

Well, I was writing in response to a post that said (and if you have any doubts, read your own subject) that we shouldn't criticize Gnome developers because they're poor, innocent hobbyists who've given us a gift.

The general argument here is that since the users aren't paying them, they have no responsibility to implement their ideas. Personally, I think that's a good thing, because it means that Gnome is free to pursue what it feels is the best design, rather than whatever features are popular at the moment. And if Gnome's design views differ from the users', they don't have to use it.

True enough, and this sort of attitude has lead, to some extent, to Gnome becoming the nice piece of software that Gnome is. However, it's also pretty much the attitude of the XFree86 people. Personally, I'm glad that pretty much every distro uses X.org these days, because the X.org organization seems focussed on addressing their users' needs.

When you can try it for free, there's little reason to complain that the product didn't meet your expectations.

Oh, there's a GREAT reason to complain. Maybe someone will listen.

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[LnxAddct]

Your certainly entitled to your oppinion, but I'm very pleased with Gnome. I love the interface and the usability. They have a very good HIG and stick by it. Its the most usable interface I've *ever* used. Even greater then the acclaimed OS X. It is light years ahead of KDE and actually focuses on functionality (KDE focuses on features, resulting in ugly interfaces regardless of the theme, as well as a bunch of half usable utilities). This is my oppinion of course, which we are all entitled to. I want the Gnome dev process to stay exactly the same, you want it to change. So lets just let them do what comes natural to them because no matter what some will hate it and some will like it and they shouldnt be responsible for choosing one group over another.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[nine-times]

I'd like to say again, for clarity, that I haven't been criticizing the Gnome software, and I'm not even criticizing the Gnome development process. I really LIKE Gnome. I use it. I'm running the new 2.10.

I am, however, trying to spark debates regarding the attitude of some people that open-source developers should not listen to users' comments, criticisms, and suggestions.

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[ClosedSource]

"Because the program is licensed free of charge .."

In other words, free as in beer!

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[Per Abrahamsen]

> Yeah, that reasoning might have worked if their
> front page had been a disclaimer like: This is
> just my hobby. Don't rely on it.

The prize should be a big hint. If you want the right to to have people listen to your complaints, *pay* for it. There are several companies that sell Gnome.

My code is free, my time isn't.

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[FooBarWidget]

"Really what I'm questioning is whether a software developer can shirk his responsibilities to his users on the basis of the software being open-sourced."

You are assuming that there are responsibilities at all. Amateur Windows closed source freeware developers don't have responsibilities. The ONLY difference between amateur Windows closed source freeware and amateur open source software is the license. Where does this sudden "responsibility" come from? Why do amateur open source developers have responsibilities, while amateur Windows closed source freeware developers don't?

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[nine-times]

As I said in the post you're responding to, I'm not sure the openness of the code has anything to do with it. Responsibility is a funny thing. Sometimes you take on responsibility by your actions even if you've never agreed to take on the responsibility and even when there's no law that says your libel. Like I said, it's one thing to have a little hobby project, and it's another to participate in what's billed as an enterprise product. I'm not sure the fact that it's open source is sufficient to shirk the responsibility you take on by encouraging people to rely on your software.

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[FooBarWidget]

"and it's another to participate in what's billed as an enterprise product."

As I said, I never billed my projects "enterprise product". Many open source developers have never claimed so. In fact, most people who claim so are users, not developers (or corporate people who really are selling enterprise products). So why do you keep generalizing and blaming everything on the hobby developers?

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[nine-times]

As I said, I never billed my projects "enterprise product". Many open source developers have never claimed so. In fact, most people who claim so are users, not developers (or corporate people who really are selling enterprise products). So why do you keep generalizing and blaming everything on the hobby developers?

I don't know what products are yours, so if you say you've never billed your products as "enterprise products", I'll just take your word for it. Yes, you're right, many open source developers are working on hobby projects. Also, many hobbyist open source developers are working on non-hobby projects. Gnome isn't a hobby project, whether some of the developers are working on it as a hobby or not.

And what exactly do you think I'm "blaming" hobby developers for? I'd explain what I was actually saying, but I've already repeated myself a few times.

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[CAIMLAS]

Why critisize them? Are you one of them, or something, and sticking up for your own?

Criticism is the mother of innovation. Without criticism, no innovation will occur. What GNOME is experiencing is the backlash from developing GNOME in a vacuum for way too long: there's been no criticism heeded, and thus it's building to a cresendo.

I imagine the GNOME project going the way of Englightenment, to some degree: very few will stick with it because the useability just isn't improveing, while everything else around it is.

Re:Let us thank, not criticize, Gnome Developers

[Twanfox]

Why would someone, for example, work on a shitty piece of code, one that they never use, *for free* just because someone bitched at them? Where's the incentive?

What's the incentive for open source programmers to develop anything at all *for free*?

I figure if that question is answered, then the answer to your question comes about at the same time.

Confused...

[LWATCDR]

I thought the good thing about Open Source was that if you wanted a feature you could add it?

Re:Confused...

[dotslasher_sri]

Yep you can add it. But it doesnt mean it has to be included in the original distribution.

Re:Confused...

[Leo McGarry]

That's only true if you spend years learning to write computer programs first.

When you look at it that way, the cost-benefit analysis just doesn't add up.

Re:Confused...

[LWATCDR]

" That's only true if you spend years learning to write computer programs first.

When you look at it that way, the cost-benefit analysis just doesn't add up."

If you do not add code or help test or document you are a free loader. You really do not have any right to complain about not getting the features you want.

This happened to me

[cvd6262]

I run GDM, so I clicked on the "Login" field and typed my name. Gnome ignored me! Completely. I was so frustrated, I thought about emailing the devs, but then I realized my keyboard was unplugged.

Eugenia is a troll

[jaymzter]

1. post trollish comment to dev list.
2. write article about it when you get flamed
3. welcome /.

Honestly, was her "question" valid for a dev list? Why not post this to gnome-list or one of the others. Nothing to see here

works

[haxmtrx]

It works for me. If I can't do something in GNOME I just find a way to work around it.

Wrong perspective...

[null etc.]

...about GNOME and its apparent lack of interest on user feedback, especially when GNOME pitches itself to follow a 'users first philosophy'

GNOME does put (certain) users first! (i.e. the developers and designers of GNOME)

this just in..

[Stalyn]

geeks on average have bad people skills... not all of them but alot. and this is what happens. why don't the gnome people hire someone as a figurehead to calm the pleas of the peons. someone personable who could go to the users and say 'whats the problem?' and then go the developers and say 'here's what they are asking for'. i just feel the users going directly to the developers isnt going to work out.

Re:this just in..

[detour207]

What would you say ya do here?

Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?

Simple

[SomeOtherGuy]

If I am going to code something for free, it is most likely going to be a feature that I personally want for my own good. Sure I will pass it on because it is the nature of OSS. Occasionally I may stroke my ego by throwing someone else a bone.

What is so wrong with that?

Rules' the same for OSS as elsewhere:

[ducomputergeek]

Piss off your consumers and they will go elsewhere...problem for OSS projects are the cost for software to switch to KDE or whatever: FREE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you need a feature, buy the feature.

[analog_line]

There are a lot of unemployed or underemployed coders out there. If there are a significant amount of people who need/want a feature that the Gnome dev team refuses to implement, pool your resources and hire a developer to write an extension to Gnome. You can submit the patch, your group and the less underemployed coder get the credit, and you get the feature you want. Even if the Gnome team doesn't accept it, nothing stops you from using it and distributing it.

Developers that are getting paid to work on GNOME are beholden to those that pay them. Yeah, they're working on an Open Source project, but by taking money for their time, the people paying them get to direct their coding. Unpaid developers are beholden to themselves and themselves alone. That's the way it should be. If you don't like it, you need to literally put your money where your mouth is. As has been said many times before, free software only costs nothing if the time spent developing it is worth nothing.

Re:If you need a feature, buy the feature.

[justins]

If you don't like it, you need to literally put your money where your mouth is.

That is a pretty good idea. The problem: in general projects like GNOME don't give users a convenient way to pool their funds toward a single feature or feature set they are commonly interested in. The answer to the dilemma might be nothing more than a well-designed donation web page which allows users to both vote on features and pay for them.

I'm sure implementing a superboring but relatively simple feature becomes a lot more interesting when 20 or 30 or 100 people pledge a few bucks each towards making it happen. Hard to say how the numbers would truly play out, however, and there are a lot of different approaches you could take to the voting.

Re:If you need a feature, buy the feature.

[analog_line]

I'm not necessarily talking about giving your money to the current GNOME devs to do it (though it's an option...if it works for political donations, why can't it work for Open source software project donations...support them to get what you want out of it).

I'm talking about hiring outside coders to extend the GNOME functionality in the way you want. Get some people, set up a simple website to solicit donations to the project, determine someone who will hire the coder, get the contract set up, and find the right coder to write the code you want.

Re:If you need a feature, buy the feature.

[StormReaver]

This needs repeating more frequently, and is a good way to quiet freeloading complainers.

I spent an entire year creating a GPL'd application at the behest of a local company. They wanted features specific to their business, and I gave them those features in my spare time. I billed them (and they paid) close to $20K to get their needs put ahead of anyone else's (my own included).

I have a lot of people ask me to write custom software, but most of them aren't willing to pay for it. When I tell them to pay up or shut up, they shut up. Then I go back to writing the features I want.

That's the bottom line. If people really need features now, they'll pay for them. All other complaints are rightfully ignored.

Re:If you need a feature, buy the feature.

[Anonymous Coward]

I HAVE bought the features! It cost me a paltry $89.95 and the package was called "Windows".

The problem is, Gnome doesn't even come close to having a minimal set of usable functionality yet! Hell, it's not even close to STABLE.

It's not like people are screaming for it to have a postscript desktop rendering engine or some instane thing. They just want it to work! So far, I haven't seen it happen with Gnome, and given the attitutes of the coders right here on /., it NEVER will.

Re:If you need a feature, buy the feature.

[joe_n_bloe]

It is well known that most successful open source development is not motivated by money, and conversely, throwing money and developers at a project leads to ... Mozilla. Even if ESR was the first to say it, open source development is driven by ego and social standing. Having a good-paying day job doesn't make your development cool, and cool is the currency in question. How many successful developers are out there who can't even afford a new computer on their own?

Lots.

Free software *is* free because people do it for free.

Re:If you need a feature, buy the feature.

[cavetroll]

exept that if it is done in a piecework style (the way many in the construction industry work), then any fixed payment is more attractive to someone who knows the codebase and can implement a feature in less time.

free market & self-centred twits

[Anonymous Coward]

in the free market, you choose the product that does best what you want. You might give suggestions to the maker and they might implement them depending on an effort/reward analysis for them (not you). If enough people stopped using their product to cause them concern, they'd make the changes most requested.

And open source is different how?

I've noticed a half frightening and half amusing tendency of people to consider the failure to satisfy their personal twitches as some world-ending event. These people typically whine that *they* will not use the product because it is not exactly what *they* want as if their boycott will bring all injustice crumbling down.

Get some perspective on your relative meaninglessness on this planet. Choose what works for you and offer suggestions on improvement with more thought than just *gimme gimme* or use something else.

I you hadn't nailed it to the perch...

[Anonymous Coward]

Things that are dead tend to fairly unresponsive to all but the most powerful stimuli.

Why oh why..

[guacamole]

.. after six years of development, Gnome 2.x (as shipped with RedHat Enterprise Linux 3) still comes with the Nautilus file manager and the control-panel application that regularly crash on login (we use NFS mounted home dirs but that's not a good excuse). And how come I started to get this stupid message that warns me when I login from a second computer telling me I have logged in from some other place? The are plenty of desktop environment (e.g. CDE..) that work just fine regardless of how many terminals you're logged in from.

Re:Why oh why..

[Bishop]

The are plenty of desktop environment (e.g. CDE..) that work just fine regardless of how many terminals you're logged in from.

And KDE isn't one of them either. I see a lot of Gnome and KDE develope that follows the single user at time philosophy used by Windows and Mac. Probably because most KDE and Gnome developers come from those environments and do not have a good *nix background. It distresses me when these supposed *nix tools don't do things in a *nix way.

While there is much to be learned from the Windows and Mac desktops, there is 30 years of *nix refinements that shouldn't be ignored.

Re:Why oh why..

[ajs]

I've never seen a panel crash. Nautilus crashes under me under FC3 (home desktop) from time to time, but it seems that this is related to previews (e.g. some underlying program that's reading a file soils itself and Nautilus wigs out). Turning off previews helped this quite a lot.

As for NFS-mounted homedirs... I don't have a problem. Is your NFS server correctly time-synced, running statd, etc.? At work I used (until very recently) and NFS-mounted homedir for Gnome. Works like a charm.

I do get some lockups, but those were a result of the crappy NVidia driver support, not Gnome (and that's NVidia's fault for not publishing specs... I had to give up and use their binary driver, since I don't spec what cards to buy).

Re:Why oh why..

[BenjyD]

I've seen several panel crashes and lockups with GNOME 2.8, plus many, many Nautilus crashes. Nautilus crashing on startup became the norm on FC3.

Most of that seems to be fixed now with 2.10: it was a major bugfixing release.

Re:Why oh why..

[ajs]

I'd be curious to see what you're doing that could cause that (I'm not saying it's your fault; software should not crash), but I'd love to know how you triggered it. That's the kind of thing that I'd enjoy debugging.

Re:Why oh why..

[BenjyD]

Crashing Nautilus on start up is pretty easy - just log in ;). I'd say it happened about 25% of the time on FC3 - the bug reports in bugzilla from other people were equally vague, but it seems to have been fixed anyway. Crashing Nautilus in normal usage was pretty easy: just open two directory windows and drag files between them for a bit, and eventually Nautilus would die. They've only just got round to thinking about writing a test suite for browsing, so I'm not surprised it was unstable.

The last panel crash I can remember was after deleting a drawer containing a weather applet from a panel - that was in 2.10. I can't remember the exact causes of many other crashes, on FC3 they were so common they all blurred into each other.

Re:Why oh why..

[ajs]

Wow. I don't know what to say. I'm posting this from FC3, and the only crashes I've seen have to do with the CD writer and the burner program that Nautilus launches. I'll see if I can replicate any of your (as yet unsolved) problems. Glad to hear the login one is fixed, though.

Insightful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you guys really think that FORK IT is the right answer to every FOSS problem?

This isn't about condeming Gnome or about forking Gnome, this is about discussing how to improve Gnome.

Re:Insightful?

[Taladar]

Actually it is the right answer to exactly one problem: You want a different approach than the original developers in developing an OSS app

Join GnomeLove, it will help all

[anandpur]

GnomeLove is an initiative that aims to help people who want to get started contributing to GNOME

GnomeLove

Re:Join GnomeLove, it will help all

[Anonymous Coward]

Been there, got flamed to death, had verbal attacks with some assholes there.

Re:Join GnomeLove, it will help all

[TheAwfulTruth]

They must have named it "Gnome Love" using the same sense of irony that Murdoch used the catch phrase "Fair and Balanced" for Fox News.

P.S. Yes, he admited that he used that phrase as an inside joke to piss off the "Liberals".

For a certain value of "users..."

[inimicus]

From the Expert Zone article:

Open-source advocates claim that OSS projects better fulfil the needs of their users, respond to and fix bugs faster, and generally respect the users more than their closed-source counterparts. While this might be true in some cases, it obviously is not an inherit trait of OSS (as illustrated by the example above).

I disagree, but at the same time, it depends on what your value of "users" is... If GNOME installation were as common as Win32 systems, it'd be a different matter, but as things stand right now, most OSS is used by more technically-inclined users who tend to share a lot of the attitudes/values of the developers.

I'd also argue that this makes limited OSS desktop usage fall into the same kind of category as a self-fulfilling prophecy, at least until there's enough interest from more "mainstream" folks to start using it.

"Call me an idiot..."

[Anonymous Coward]

you idiot

Re:"Call me an idiot..."

[Anita Coney]

Thanks, it's always nice to get the feedback you expected!

What ruddish

[Billly Gates]

No I am not going to even bother to RTFA. I agree with the first comment here that its trollware and flamebait.

Gnome is alot more consistant than KDE and Sun donated a large usability study for gnome to improve its UI. The results are already showing with each release.

KDE use to be alot more flexible, integrated feel, and easy to use, but that is no longer the case anymore. This is coming from a KDE fan.

KDE has menu's everywhere and its hard to find particular settings and the titlebars are way too big, menu's too big, some of the fonts are ugly, and the problems are numerous compared to earlier versions. I looked at the newest build of KDevelop a few months ago and the UI was unbearable compared to earlier versions. Try reading the documentation and reading your code at the same time? Screen space is eaten up.

I do not intend to start a flamewar here. My point above was Gnome may not be perfect but its rapidly improving compared to its rival. THe UI study from SUN and the new 2.x is alot better and each new release focuses on usability rather than just bug fixes or features.

I look at where its heading rather than where it is. In my book gnome is winning the war currently but I will wait until KDE 4.0 comes which is rumored to have a completely redone UI.

Gnome is logically designed and highly flexible. In my opinion the only thing it lacks or the number of apps like KDE and perhaps some equilivant of KAppFinder for menu updating. Under MacOSX and WIndows, when you install an app it is included automatically in the taskbar. In this day and age all modern versions of Unix come shipped with KDE or Gnome or both. Menu updating should be included.

Gnome is on the right path and will be on par with Windows if its not already.

Re:What ruddish

[Anonymous Coward]

hahaha that was a good comment. never laughed more.

Re:What ruddish

[otis wildflower]

Answering trollware with trollware, I see?

Well, while I'm calling the kettle black, here's a few nice KDE bits:

* KParts
* KIOSlaves
* DCOP
* launching URLs from the kicker panel's cmdline applet
* konqueror and konqi-based file manager are totally tits.
* KControlCenter is _totally_ integrated, and I wish it had a distro-independent configuration manager for system params (like interfaces, disk configuration, passwd file management, maybe an LDAP administration frontend).

Also, if you don't like the theme elements, you can CHANGE IT. Duh. Personally, I think the Baghira stuff is hella sweet, and when I rip my OS X fonts over (thanks to fondu) I can get some very pretty Lucida Grande and Helvetica Neue (not to mention a really swank Futura).

KDE use to be alot more flexible, integrated feel, and easy to use, but that is no longer the case anymore.

Care to share what you're smoking with the rest of the class? KWallet, Konqi, KAddressbook, KCalendar, KMail, all this stuff is integrated or in the process of being integrated, in emulation of Mac OS X. KDE has made amazingly huge leaps in integration just comparing 3.0 to 3.3. With the onward march towards groupware, integration will improve, and thanks to KParts and DCOP it will be rich and awesome. GNOME doesn't come close without unbelievable CORBA-style bl0at.

Under MacOSX and WIndows, when you install an app it is included automatically in the taskbar.

What version of OS X are you talking about? I've installed a number of apps in many different ways (carbon installer, OS X standard pkg, drag-and-drop) and I have yet to see a single one of those apps register on the Dock as part of the installation. Granted, they appear when you launch them, and you can then 'permanentize' them, but the installation process doesn't do it.

Gnome is on the right path and will be on par with Windows if its not already.

This is a bug, not a feature.

The right path is Mac OS X + better themability, more advanced functionality (but with layers that start with sensible defaults and allow 'advanced' users to plumb the depths), and scriptability in open languages.

Re:What ruddish

[Billly Gates]

I dont care about the innerworks if I am a (l)user.

I never said KDE was better or worse in all area's. I am only saying gnome is getting better and focusing on UI while KDE is lacking in this area.

However KDE 4.0 will focus on that after their own usability lab funding so the tables might turn.

To say gnome is not focusing on UI and ignoring its users is plainly false. THey may move slower and conservatively but each release focuses more and more on UI rather than internals.

Re:What ruddish

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha clueless people like you are often quite entertaining - really!

Re:What ruddish

[otis wildflower]

I dont care about the innerworks if I am a (l)user.

Yes you do, if they provide easy, useful, and logical functionality.

For example, in OS X, the underlying frameworks and the OS integrate addressbook, email, chat so that every entry in your addressbook, if it has an email address, that email address bypasses your junk filter. If you're reading an email by someone in your addressbook who's logged into AIM or who is running iChat (or an iChatalike) on Zeroconf, a green dot will appear next to their name indicating that they're available for chat.

By default, if you don't have a photo for someone's addressbook entry, the system uses their AIM icon if they have one. That icon syncs to phones via iSync (if you have a phone that displays photos in the addressbook, like my P800). When someone calls, their addressbook photo appears on the phone.

All this stuff is done by having a systemwide addressbook and other standard systemwide info stores, all addressable cross-app via built-in frameworks. Not to mention that the info stores can, where applicable, be housed in open standards storage systems like LDAP or WebDAV. The next rev of OS X will bring Jabber, and I hope that Jabber will get the USB treatment (invented elsewhere but popularized by Apple until taken up by the rest of the world). And all this is without even mentioning iLife integration!

At this point, all the stuff you get FOR FREE OUT OF THE BOX WITH OS X is as powerful as Exchange/Outlook if you build a WebDAV and LDAP server to handle the data stores. It's just not integrated with that left-side button bar interface.

This is really superb, rich, intuitive, easy technology, and GNOME comes nowhere close. KDE is closer and advancing steadily. Being a UI fascist is only part of the battle: I would take intuitive functionality over consistency any day, and OS X is the living example that the choice is && not ||.

Now if only the OS X services menu were a right-click option.. Bloody carbon finder...

ps: Cool feature would be to have a GPS receiver built into a laptop, and have it change its settings (timezone, network config, etc) based on where it is. Privacy aside, of course..

Hi Eugenia!

[Anonymous Coward]

How are you today?

Not really a problem.

[kerrle]

While I'll completely agree that there are portions of Gnome that could be better, Eugenia's peice is way off.

Looking at the progress Gnome has made in the last few versions, its hard for me to even see where this is coming from. Yes, we're still missing a menu editor, and yes, that is a problem. Overall, though, each recent version of Gnome has been an improvement over the past, and the useability is only getting better.

If you look at the event that started this whole article, it was essentially Eugenia extrapolating "We'll do that if there's a developer who wants to" into "We don't care about what our users want". Hardly what I'd consider a logical step.

I read OS News daily because it provides a good roundup of news I like - much like Slashdot - but in the past few months, I've come to dread any article with Eugenia's name on it (much like many here dreaded Michael's name popping up). If things anywhere don't work like she expects them to, it's suddenly a huge overwhelming problem with Open Source in general - and usually, they aren't even problems at all - just spats where the developers of whatever she was using didn't agree with her suggestion/request.

I was a KDE user when I started using linux as my desktop three-four years ago, and it's still a good desktop. Nothing wrong with KDE, and I don't want to take this in that direction. But I switched to Gnome with 2.6 - it just felt better to me, and 2.8, 2.10 are continuing to improve. At least for this user, Gnome is doing exactly what I want it to.

Re:Not really a problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I'm grateful for the work of Gnome devs. It was Gnome, after all, that sold me on Linux and I've been using it for years since. I'm not a programmer. I'm a writer.

I've been pleased with the progress of Gnome through 2.4, 2.6 and 2.8 and I'm waiting patiently for 2.10 to make it into Debian experimental. I like spatial nautilus. No one forced me to upgrade. I chose it each time.

Thank-you, devs.

As for OSNews, it's probably best to avoid any of their "exclusive" content. Just as the modern popular press mistakes a sneer for journalism, the web press mistakes a whine for news.

Re:Not really a problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

She does nothing but solidify the notion that women are good for nothing except making us food and babies. Which is sometimes one and the same.

Re:Not really a problem.

[PitaBred]

I just gotta give you props for this troll. I mean, sexism, computing, cannabalism and dead babies, all within two sentences. I don't think black holes can approach that density of insensitivity :)

Re:Not really a problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.

I hated using Gnome or KDE for the longest time. Wouldn't touch it, except to try it. When I tried it it just reinforced my dislike.

Not that I hated it, hated it. It was ok for some users, but they got in the way, provided to much bloat and didn't realy accomplish anything usefull.

Much better for me was to use a minimalistic window manager to handle windows and use the shell for everything.

Now I still use the command line a lot, but I started using Gnome with 2.4 and loved it. I began using it for the specific reason that I like the spatial setup. I LIKE that.

For me the GUI is for doing things that GUI's are good for. The command line is for things that the command line is good for.

I use command line for system administration, and gui for managing my home directory and playing media files.

To me the current Gnome desktop provides the best balance. KDE is to busy and overkill and messy. Don't like it. Don't like 'file browsers', although they are usefull for certain things. That's why I have a icon that goes 'nautilus --browser' that I use to open up network resources and such.

Loved Gnome 2.4, and am glad that they are working on fixing and streamlining current functionality before adding on requested features like a motherfucker.

Re:Not really a problem.

[kerrle]

Whoa. Until I saw the modded-down post, I was really confused.

Re:Not really a problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Describes my feelings about it perfectly.

Re:Not really a problem.

[nine-times]

If you look at the event that started this whole article, it was essentially Eugenia extrapolating "We'll do that if there's a developer who wants to" into "We don't care about what our users want". Hardly what I'd consider a logical step.

Yeah, hopefully what was intended was just a simple statement of fact. No one can force developers to work on these things. If it's an individual working in his spare time, then he'll work on what he wants to and what he views as important. If it's a paid programmer, he'll work on what he's being paid to work on, which is whatever his employer views as important. That's just the way it is. Someone has to work on it for it to be worked on.

I think there's just some worry that what was intended was to say that developers shouldn't be expected to work on improvements that don't affect them personally. Like if users are experience a problem, but the developers themselves haven't run across that problem for their own personal work, then screw the users.

Personally I think it's an issue of people getting angry and misunderstandings all around.

Re:Eugenia is a stupid whore, mostly

[spankers]

Do you have pictures? :)

And this matters.. why?

[brunes69]

Your own point makes this irrelevant.

If OSS developers develop software base don what the want/need (which they do), they **do not care** if it becomes widespread.

I work on Free Software becauase I like it. It is fun, and I feel personally I get something out of it, both as a developer and as a person.

I do not do it because people use my software. I don't care *at all* if my software becomes "widespread". That is what slashdot Linux fanboys do not seem to understand - **you** may want Linux and OSS to take over the world, but the majority of the people **writing it**, do not really care. They all have their **own** goals for **their** software, which may or may not include taking over the world.

You can't just take the community as a whole, and assume it has widespread adoption as a primary goal. Sure, people love praise, people love to feed their egos. But we are not all at the dinner table for the dessert here. We are here for the meal.

Re:And this matters.. why?

[winkydink]

You can't just take the community as a whole, and assume it has widespread adoption as a primary goal.

Gee in one post I'm a running capitalist dog and in another I'm a OSS zealot. Cool!

I base my observation of the desire for OSS to go forth, be fruitful and multiply on reading the sentiments of (mostly) pro-OSS people on forums like this one.

Re:And this matters.. why?

[brunes69]

There is a difference between being pro-OSS and assuming that widespread adoption is the driving force behind OSS software.

The driving force behind the vast majority of OSS software is what it has always been - the desire to scratch an itch to be creative.

Anything beyond that is nothing more than a side-effect of this itch.

Re:And this matters.. why?

[Create an Account]

You can't just take the community as a whole, and assume it has widespread adoption as a primary goal.

I don't have a strong opinion here (I use Windows, and Bill hasn't told me what my opinion is, yet) but maybe it should be the primary goal. Widespread adoption would lead to positive benefits for you, wouldn't it?

Think of the available Internet bandwidth if all of the zombie Windows spam machines and virus spewers were on more secure Linux OSs. That would be good for everybody.

Think of the game software that would be able to run on Linux natively. Not thousands of titles, but hundreds of thousands in the coming decades.

Heck, you're obviously bright. I'm sure you can think of many more benefits from widespread adoption than I could (remember, I use Windows). Anyway, that's my 2 cents worth.

Re:And this matters.. why?

[macshit]

I base my observation of the desire for OSS to go forth, be fruitful and multiply on reading the sentiments of (mostly) pro-OSS people on forums like this one.

The random mutterings of the "pro-OSS crowd" are not necessarily synonymous with the desires of the people actually writing the software.

The former are very loud and noticeable, but the latter are the only thing that really matters when it comes to deciding how development should be done.

The principle of Open-Source

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

is that everybody is free to change the software to his or her needs. When a desired feature isn't implemented, the right way to go is not to bitch that nobody implemented that feature *in their free time*, but to hire a developer to do it.

It's competition in a free market baby! Take it or leave it.
Now I was pretty content when I used GNOME (I fell for a Mac...).

It already is

[tacokill]

OSS is *already* that way. Joe user
a) has no clue what "open source" means and might even be a little iffy on the meaning of "software"

b) has absolutely no clue about patents, copyrights, or anything else open software prides itself on. Yes, he's heard of them...but he couldn't distiguish between them if his life depended on it

c) could care less about ideological hatred of Microsoft

d) barely knows what the internet is, other than WWW -- and he barely knows how to use that!


If you don't think OSS is elitist, just do this: go to Wal-Mart, hang out in the parking lot and ask 100 people if they know what Linux is. I will bet you dollars to donuts that less than 3 could define it as an "operating system". And WAL-MART sells Lindows on some machines! (as I recall). You might hear a few answers that allude to computers or some abstract technology but very very very few will know what it really is.

Now, multiply and scale to American demographics. Linux, OSS, OpenOffice, and all the other free software out there is a blib on the radar screen. Very very few outside of the "IT Industry" know anything about it and the vast majority couldn't care less.

Re:It already is

[Taladar]

I don't think you will find more than 10 out of 100 people that could define Windows as an Operating System.

What was your point again?

Re:It already is

[tacokill]

You just made it.

My point is that your average user couldn't care less for all 99% of the talk on Slashdot. The original poster mentioned computing (specifically GNOME) as elitist. I was simply making the point that he's correct. All this bickering about users this and users that is irrelevant until "users" actually understand what we are talking about. And I see that happening....never.

Duelling desktop environments

[Anonymous Coward]

Gah. GNOME does suck. It feels so unfinished it's not even funny. I say unfinished because parts will be broken and remain that way while they go and work on neato emerging tech- constantly.

Then they go and change the whole view of the desktop around and upset the whole userbase - and they still haven't finished hammering the issues out of its supporting systems.

I got so fed up with broken crap (and a generally bland UI) that I actually compiled KDE last month (now using 3.4 rc1) and WOW. KDE is so much nicer than gnome now.

yes, KDE can be very ugly (crowded feel) but you can change that easily. And there are so many options on configurability, odds are you'll find settings that fit with your needs.

You don't get that with GNOME at all. You get force-fed design decisions that are sometimes fully baked but always halfassed in the implementation.

Lingering panel bugs - halfassed Xinerama support, that horrible Metashitty WM

I just put on xorg 6.8.sompn + Composite enabled with the new kompmgr. Translucency is awesome- I can quickly see in between my windows as they overlap. I used to raise a window to see. GNOME will get there in another 2 years and it will be buggy.

Installing KDE after 6 years of mocking it for being Kool made me eat my own hat.(it tasted great)

I suggest you do the same. you might find it refreshing.

Re:Duelling desktop environments

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, drink the Koolaid Destop Environment.

I think the developers need to think a bit

[Anonymous Coward]

Software is about solving a solution. Sure. Only for the developer that develops the software. Well it is a lot of wasted effort.

I used Gimp a long time, until v2.0, where I couldn't use it for painting anymore. Well, I'm not going to go into all the details, except having used it since the early 1.x days. I got fed up with the developers' attitude and have now started my own project where I'm creating a paint application for Linux. I thought, forget them. They won't listen.

I can do this. I can make a program. Most users can't. They will just get fed up and install windows/get a mac. That's the loss of the OSS developers, not the user. The OSS developer will have on his/her track record that they aren't good enough. Simple as that.

Gnome people have turned into Micro$oft

[syntap]

I asked Microsoft to add a feature to automatically stream pr0n to my login screen but they refused. They don't listen to users either, just like the Gnome guys.

Re:Gnome people have turned into Micro$oft

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I asked for that feature too and they refused.

Maybe if we start up a user advocate group and petition Microsoft, then write sour grapes crybaby articles all over the internet, they'll see the demand for the feature and implement it.

Those little punkass developers won't do it though, I just know it. They don't care about their users...

Bah, not her again

[Anonymous Coward]

Eugenia really likes to make mountains out of molehills. And since she runs "osnews.com", she tries to make her positions sound far more widely believed than they really are.

Eugenia needs to read Alan Cooper's "The Inmates are Running the Asylum". Asking users what they want would be almost as bad as just letting the geeks write what they want. It's the difference between task-based programs (what Linux/open-source have traditionally been) and goal-based designs (which are better for users). What users find most useful are things they wouldn't have even thought to ask for.

The problem isn't that users aren't designing the software -- that wouldn't be good, either. The problem is that there aren't good *designers* designing the software -- Gnome's development isn't "closed", but if it were, it would actually be more effective at this, because it would have a consistency of design. (Look at Mac OS X, for example. Completely closed, yet absolutely *adored* by countless people.)

Eugenia, by her own admission, is interested in operating systems. She likes to tinker with old ones. This, *by definition*, means she's way way outside the target demographic for Gnome: normal people. Designing user interfaces isn't designing for corner cases like her -- it's impossible to create a decent user interface for all corner cases.

I guess it's useful to have people as passionate as Eugenia around, but keep them the hell away from designing software. Compare Jef Raskin, who was also crazy and passionate, but who actually built the stuff he talked about, which meant it was actually feasible.

Well, not so much an idiot

[shostiru]

as just mistaken. Why? Threee reasons.

First, open source developers are increasingly describing their projects as user-oriented, enterprise-ready, etc. Now, I have nothing against hobby development in which users are not a concern because it's purely for enjoyment. Heck, given the choice I'd ignore users' requests and just work on projects of interest to me in my job if I could. But if you're going to do that, be honest about it. Don't describe your software as user-oriented, because it's not. Make it explicit that it's a hobby project, and you have no real interest in the desires of your user base.

Second, while ignoring users may be a lot more pleasant than listening to their concerns and addressing them, it's *very* ultimately bad engineering practice (then again, job titles aside most software developers are NOT engineers!), and reinforces a selfishness and arrogance that can bleed over into one's professional work. I've seen this happen in others, I've seen it happen in myself a few times. If you're going to open your project up to the world, you're limiting your own experience and opportunities by maintaining it as a navel-gazing exercise.

Finally, considering user requests can move development in an unexpected direction. Sometimes it's the wrong direction, and I think it's OK to answer a request with "that's a bad idea, and here's why". But sometimes after going in that direction, adding some features, maybe refactoring a bit, you look back and say "why didn't I think of that?" Any community of developers develops blind spots and biases, and sometimes these can be substantial enough for outside input to benefit everyone.

Now, of the above I think the first reason is the most compelling. You're under no obligation to do anything to improve your project or your skills or wisdom as a developer. However, I think you *are* obligated to describe your project honestly.

Re:Well, not so much an idiot

[cheesybagel]

They did say "that's a bad idea, and here's why", but she proceded to mail-bomb them with her bitching regardless.

Re:Well, not so much an idiot

[nine-times]

Second, while ignoring users may be a lot more pleasant than listening to their concerns and addressing them, it's *very* ultimately bad engineering practice (then again, job titles aside most software developers are NOT engineers!), and reinforces a selfishness and arrogance that can bleed over into one's professional work. I've seen this happen in others, I've seen it happen in myself a few times. If you're going to open your project up to the world, you're limiting your own experience and opportunities by maintaining it as a navel-gazing exercise.

Finally, considering user requests can move development in an unexpected direction. Sometimes it's the wrong direction, and I think it's OK to answer a request with "that's a bad idea, and here's why". But sometimes after going in that direction, adding some features, maybe refactoring a bit, you look back and say "why didn't I think of that?" Any community of developers develops blind spots and biases, and sometimes these can be substantial enough for outside input to benefit everyone.

I think both of these point (my reading of them is that they're similar) indicate what I view to be the most unfortunate aspect of when developers decide that they don't care what their users think: it often makes for a worse product.

Now, I'm not someone who believes in the "inherent intelligence of everyday people". I think people can be really stupid. However, the way in which they're stupid usually is that they're bad about understanding their problems and finding solutions to their problems, but they're usually pretty good at knowing that they have a problem.

As an example, think of when a person goes to the doctor/ER because they think something is wrong. Now, of course, there are hypochondriacs who go to the doctor all the time over stupid things, but mostly, when someone goes to the doctor because they believe something is wrong, for the most part, something *is* wrong. I might go in because I have a terrible sore throat. I might insist to the doctor that I have strep. It might turn out that I have throat cancer. I might insist that I need antibiotics, and he might insist that I need radiation.

Similarly, in software development, if a whole lot of users are complaining, there probably *is* a problem. They might not really understand the problem, and their proposed solutions might be wrong, but if you're getting loads of similar complaints, there is a problem somewhere. Why? Because software is all about the users. When software isn't being used by users, it's just a series of bits.

Maybe it's just a perception problem (users aren't understanding things), but a perception problem *is* a problem. Maybe you just need better documentation or need to explain something better. Maybe it's something tiny, like you label a button differently and people understand what's going on at that point. Maybe something is designed badly.

Beyond fixing problems, anyone trying to solve problems should be really open to input, because you never know what will give you some amazing inspiration. Contrary to popular belief, great thinkers don't come up with great ideas in a vacuum.

I guess my point is, the only way to know is to listen to the users. Either way, I think developers (all developers) should remember two things:

1. Satisfaction among target users is a good measure of the quality of software. If your target user is a developer, and developers are happy with it, that's an _indication_ that you've done a good job.
2. And that's because satisfaction among target users is an inherent quality of good sofware. What I mean here is, software is a tool. If users of that tool aren't finding it useful, it is, by definition, a bad tool.

Re:Well, not so much an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome is part of the GNU project and RMS is shooting for "as easy to use as the mac".

Re:Well, not so much an idiot

[poofyhairguy82]

On your first point: Well, the problem is that a claim like "user-oriented" is not a concrete term that can be defined in a dictionary.

The difference is in the definition. To me "user centric" means that the project or institution wishes to target its efforts at the most common demographic of users. I personally think Gnome is honest when it says it is user centric- I use Gnome everyday because (don't laugh at me) I like how the options menu and feature list don't runnith over with tons of things most computer users don't use. To me, the opposite of a user centric project would be "minority centric" and would have more options and features only users at the far ends of the bell curse ever touch at the expense of most of the users. Gnome's best features are features that aren't "officially" part of Gnome but every Gnome distro includes. The ability to be extended easily (by users) is what allows Gnome's strategy- targeting only the largest demographic of computer users- to work and succeed. They would only be liars to me if they began to complicate their desktop and add in tons of features just because a few loud users want it.

Re:Well, not so much an idiot

[vanicat]

Second, while ignoring users may be a lot more pleasant than listening to their concerns and addressing them

I don't see how "A feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it" mean that the developer will ignore users. As you said

Finally, considering user requests can move development in an unexpected direction. Sometimes it's the wrong direction, and I think it's OK to answer a request with "that's a bad idea, and here's why". But sometimes after going in that direction, adding some features, maybe refactoring a bit, you look back and say "why didn't I think of that?" Any community of developers develops blind spots and biases, and sometimes these can be substantial enough for outside input to benefit everyone.

I'm sure lot of developer agreed with this, (I do, even if I'm not a very active developer), but still I will do something only if I want to do it. And this don't alway mean that I want the feature, I may only want to please some of my (few ?) user, or I may belive that my software will be better with this. But won't make me do something I don't want to do if you don't me paid for it.

Re:Well, not so much an idiot

[Jason Earl]

The Gnome hackers are listening to their customers, they just aren't listening to Eugenia. Instead they are listening to the marketing departments at places like Red Hat, Novell, or Sun. The marketing departments talk to customers and find out what it would take to sell Gnome desktops. Then the developers are then given marching orders.

Once upon a time the Gnome developers were given free reign to design whatever the heck that they wanted and they designed a hyper-configurable desktop scriptable in a variant of Lisp. Now the Gnome developers are listening to actual customers, and the bottom line is that they are ripping out as much configuration as possible. This loss of functionality makes some former Gnome users (like Eugenia) upset, but that's what happens when you try and design software that is approachable by normal folks.

The thing to remember is that the Gnome folks aren't targetting the kind of people that write to development mailing lists or know anything about bugzilla, and that's a good thing. The less the Gnome hackers listen to Eugenia the more likely they are to create something that is useable by my grandma.

Re:Well, not so much an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an open source developer with a number of projects. I do it full time, if a user comes to me with a feature request and makes a donation i am far more likely to do that request promptly because they have shown they are fincially willing to support it.

Re:Well, not so much an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

The less the Gnome hackers listen to Eugenia the more likely they are to create something that is useable by my grandma.

If you design something that is useable by idiots (or grandmas), only idiots (or grandmas) will want to use it.

But I do agree that not listening to Eugenia is good advice.

Re:Well, not so much an idiot

[ClosedSource]

"If you design something that is useable by idiots (or grandmas), only idiots (or grandmas) will want to use it."

So, you don't use toilet paper. Or are you an idiot? Or is it just your arguments that are idiotic?

The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[ultrabot]

I hereby share the great secret of making the most of spatial Nautilus.

1. Create a "places" folder weher you drag shortcuts to your favourite folders (you know, the usual: mp3, pr0n, work, school). ctrl+shift+drag = create shortcut (symlink). Put the "places" folder on desktop & toolbar.

2. Press ctrl+q to "kill all windows" when you've done whatever you were trying to do w/ file manager.

Yeah, it still doesn't approach the glory that is Konqueror but it's not worse than "browse" mode of Nautilus either.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[hey]

Sure, but it creates too much clutter.
It would nicer if it was like Firefox's create new window or tab.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[symbolic]

Konqueror has its own little disaster - the horzontally-expanding menus that take over your entire screen. I will not use it until that is fixed or at least an option is provided to disable it for those of use that prefer a more efficient use of screen space.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Your right. Your right.
We SHOULD all change our habits to fit the GNOME paradigm, rather than the other way around.

I guess I should stop bitching about how, horrible, nonsensicle, slow, clunky, awkward, unintuative, difficult and inferior spatial browsing is and just brainwash myself into liking, no, adoring the 50+ open windows peppered across all my desktops.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[A coward on a mouse]

lowly user: What is this pus?

gnome dev/fanboy: It's spatial Nautilus! It's easier to use; 9 out of 10 eggheaded usability experts say it's miles better than the old way.

lowly user: I hate it. Take it away. Put it back the way it was before.

gnome dev/fanboy: But you haven't given it a chance! See, re-organize everything on your hard drive and change the way you perform your everyday tasks, and spatial Nautilus will save you 0.5 milliseconds on some operations.

lowly user: I just want it to work the way I'm used to.

gnome dev/fanboy: Well, you're wrong for wanting that.

lowly user: Put it back right now! I'm going insane from all the extra windows!

gnome dev/fanboy: Well, just learn this new shortcut key to close them all when you're done.

lowly user: I don't want them to open in the first place. This sucks. I hate it. Put it back.

gnome dev/fanboy: Man, you are just like the other 10,000 lowly users I've talked to this week. What is wrong with you people? I can't imagine how you Luddites will react to the next version, when we make Dvorak (which is 2% more efficient than QWERTY) the default keyboard layout and force you to crawl over broken glass to change it back!

lowly user: Guess I need to look into purchasing that Windows license after all...

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Abcd1234]

adoring the 50+ open windows peppered across all my desktops.

Wow! What are you doing that you have *50* file manager windows open?!

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[arose]

You are of course free to change Gnome to fit yourself... I find browser-mode-like file managers unusable, before spatial Nautilus I was using Midnight Commander and the shell (now Nautilus and shell). Thank you Gnome developers, you made my computing better!

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Lendrick]

nonsensicle

Mmmm... sweet, frozen nonsense on a stick.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Elwood P Dowd]

Waitasecond. Are you saying that y'all spatial Nautilus users aren't using some modifier key to Open-next-window-and-close-last-one? Like the option key on System 9? System 9 was only usable for complex directory tasks because they'd thought of every angle. Most end users took decades to get complex tasks done.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Anonymous Coward]

gnome dev/fanboy: It's spatial Nautilus! It's easier to use; 9 out of 10 eggheaded usability experts say it's miles better than the old way.

I think you mean "9 out of 10 programmers". Programmers may _think_ that they are usability experts, but it is not so often the case (which is of course the point of your story).

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[prockcore]

give me a break. That conversation could've been about *any* OS. OS9 people bitched about how horrible OSX is, Win98 people bitched about win2k, win2k people bitched about winxp.

People don't like change.. and it takes a while for something new to find acceptance.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Kristoffer Lunden]

Well yes, Shift+Click does exactly that. Not that it really makes anything much better if you don't like the metafor in the first place.

The difference lies mainly in how you want your metafor to be, the browser metafor "browses around", looking at new things in the same view. The spatial metafor tries to model everything you want to look at as a separate object, and tries to model this by opening it separately. Some people say that this is easier to understand and relate to for beginners, but that is really hard to judge for someone like me, who is used to browser and commander interfaces.

Anyhow, the idea as I recall it was to lower the bar for everyone, especially people new to computers - which is a great goal. The bad thing was that they tried to tell us all how we wanted to do things.

I'm pretty new to Gnome, been using KDE until I switched to Ubuntu. I've been trying out the spatial way for quite some time now (as in months), just to give it a fair chance. Because, I've recently started to understand that especially we power users are missing out on a lot of great things just because we grumpily do things the way we've always done them, and so I've started to try and do things the designers way instead of spending hours on reconfiguring every computer I sit down at. I've discovered that several things I've frowned upon for years, for reasons that now escape me, actually make my life easier. Like the trash can, believe it or not! ;-)

Anyhow spatial navigation isn't nearly as bad as people say when you get used to it, but it still mostly clutters and slows things down. I'm probably gonna call the experiment in favour of the nay sayers soon and start browsing again. :)

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Rahga]

I guess I should stop bitching about how, horrible, nonsensicle, slow, clunky, awkward, unintuative, difficult and inferior spatial browsing is and just brainwash myself into liking, no, adoring the 50+ open windows peppered across all my desktops.

I can't claim not to have done any GNOME development, but this is not an official position... just know this: If you've managed to get 50+ open windows peppered across your desktop, may you are indeed the one that needs to change.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[lewp]

The only reason you'd have 50 Nautilus windows open, in spatial or browser mode, is because you need access to 50 directories at once. In that case, you'll need 50 windows open with either setup.

If you spend about 30 seconds (seriously, that's all it takes) you'll find that there are ways to navigate spatial Nautilus without having to open superfluous windows.

You are more than welcome to dislike spatial Nautilus. If you're used to Windows (or KDE), then it is different. I think it was a stupid decision to not initially make it easy to switch back to browser mode to accommodate people most familiar with the browser interface (let's face it, that's most people). That said, there's nothing inherently inferior about spatial Nautilus, and there are some good theoretical arguments in its favor.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[A coward on a mouse]

Actually, I do mean usability experts. The big thing going around during the whole spatial Nautilus debacle was that it was a well-known fact among usability experts that users are more efficient if things stay in the same place. As applied by the gnomers to Nautilus this meant that if you open a folder today, it is shown at this size at this location on the screen, with its contents displayed in these locations; when you open it tomorrow, everything will be right where you left it.

So, this is representative of the BS gnome devs and fanboys were spouting at the time. Now, I don't know if the usability experts would have blessed the implementation of spatial Nautilus, or whether the usability experts ever said anything remotely similar to what the gnomers were attributing to them. Either way, the fact is the gnomers were saying it wasn't their fault, it was the usability experts' fault and that the gnomers were just following the divine commandments of the usability experts. Those who disliked spatial Nautilus were therefore blasphemers against the gods of usability and to be excommunicated, unless they posted their views on the Internet, in which case they were to be burned at the stake.

Don't misunderstand me, I think GNOME is a good project and disagree with the overall characterization of the GNOME devs as willfully ignorant of their users' wants and needs, but the spatial Nautilus thing was a gigantic mistake and very poorly handled. Not to mention being pretty humorous from the outside.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[rutwms]

If you don't like a bunch of parent folders open, then open folders with a middle mouse click. Using the middle mouse button to open a child folder closses the parent. Using it on a parent folder, via the menu in the lower left, closes the cild. This makes it very easy to open multiple windows when you want (copying, moving, etc.) and to keep your desktop uncluttered when you don't.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[A coward on a mouse]

Give *me* a break. Changing something as basic as the file manager so radically is a bigger deal than, well, just about anything else, from an end-user's perspective. I haven't heard that the Finder in OSX was in no way similar to the Finder from OS9, and Windows Explorer has been pretty much the same since Windows 95.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is parent modded as funny? I find it to be spot on. I used Gnome since 0.x and all the way up to 2.6. Then I got so utterly fed up with the developers "knowing what I wanted" and removing every single nice feature, that I first tried KDE and then just went for Windows XP instead.

I mean... seriously. Why would I use Gnome when it's just a bad imitation of Windows and OSX? The one thing I really, really loved was the tab completion in the file dialogs, but then they decided to remove it. Fine, don't have it as the default, but at least give me the choice to fscking enable it!
I haven't felt much Gnome Love since 1.4.

As for Windows XP... It feels like sleeping with the enemy and I really *hate* not having Linux underneath. But when I'm not allowed to have any tab completion no matter what (and don't give me that "You can just press CTRL-L crap), I might as well use the best desktop OS out there.

So what should they do?
Combine the flexibilty of KDE with the looks of Gnome. We need a desktop that's both good looking and has functionality for power users (as well as regular users). The easy fix: Jimmac should switch to KDE :)

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Anonymous Coward]

gyaah..

you're right.
you're right.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Jason Hood]

Negative. Try developing on a large scale (as in 50k files 8GB) project. Spatial is flat out horrible. There is a reason even microsoft disabled that in 98 and never looked back...

Each his own, just dont tell others that they are doing something wrong because they cant follow someone else's rules.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Anonymous Coward]

I find browser-mode-like file managers unusable, before spatial Nautilus I was using Midnight Commander

That's the most ridiculous thing I have read in a while. You are aware that Midnight Commander is the very epitome of non-spatial file managers, are you?

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[arose]

It's certainly isn't an explorer xlone either. What I'm saying that both spatial and dual pane are far better for me.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[prockcore]

I haven't heard that the Finder in OSX was in no way similar to the Finder from OS9

Um, OS9 finder was spacial.. OSX wasn't.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Klivian]

>Konqueror has its own little disaster - the horzontally-expanding menus that take over your entire screen.
Strange, I have used Konqueror since one of the 2.0 betas and have never seen this problem. Can you please explain to me what you are talking about?

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Klivian]

>The easy fix: Jimmac should switch to KDE :)
Perhaps, but then he would be forced to work faster:-) The Gnome icon themes has been ported to KDE, but I don't think they see much use. The reason, to few icons. The Gnome iconsets have way too few icons to cover the functionality of KDE.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Kristoffer Lunden]

Or Shift-Click. Just like already mentioned above. That little convenience is just a very small part of the whole idea of spatiality and whether you want it or not, as it does in no way change the overall way of doing things. Which in turn is what counts, not whether you can kinda sidestep it slightly.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"I guess I should stop bitching about how, horrible, nonsensicle, slow, clunky, awkward, unintuative, difficult and inferior spatial browsing is and just brainwash myself into liking, no, adoring the 50+ open windows peppered across all my desktops."

Or, you could have taken the 30 seconds that you took to write your post and used them to change the GConf setting.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[rutwms]

I only mention it because I love it and I don't think many of the persons who complain about spatial know about it.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Per Abrahamsen]

> We SHOULD all change our habits to fit the GNOME paradigm, rather than the other way around.

And other people complain that the free desktops are not inventive enough...

But I do feel with you. Having to wait a whole *month* for a patch that make it more convenient to disable a specific feature. How incredible lazy the developers must be, when we know how trivially easy it is to make to make fast decisions and releases for software projects with hundreds of active developers all over the world, millions lines of code, a steering commitee and the strong economic interest and involment of several large companies.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[symbolic]

If you have more than a certain number of bookmarks in your Bookmarks menu, for example, instead of scrolling vertically like any sane menu implementation, it starts a new column. If that column fills up, it creates a third, etc. In a nutshell, it's quite lame.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Anonymous Coward]

idiot. How many normal users do you think would even dare approaching gconf? Even I feel a bit hesitant since the settings are poorly documented and more than a bit unclear. For instance "What's the difference between changing stuff in "system" vs "schemas/system"" ? Am I supposed to have to google if I want to set basic stuff to my liking..?

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Klivian]

Ok, I see. I also see why I have never encountered it, to me it sounds quite lame to have a gazillion bookmark entries in a flat list and not organizing them in a logic way using folders.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Anonymous Coward]

"spacial"?? do you mean "special" or "spatial"? not to be a spelling nazi, but you've misspelled yourself out of coherence.

Re:The grand secret of spatial nautilus

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, OS9 finder was spacial.. OSX wasn't.

Who cares? The whole nautilus issue is about being able to bash free software developers. We all know Apple is the God of usability so we can't do that to them.

It's like all that ranting about how awful gtk's new file open/save dialogs are. When you show them screenshots that prove they are almost identical to Mac OS X's, they just shut up or start ranting about how the MacOSX desktop theme makes them actually usable. Heh.

WTF?

[amembleton]

This guy asked the Gnome developers to add a feature and he got the following response:
"A feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it"

What is wrong with this response? He isn't paying them, they are developing Gnome because they feel pasionate about what they do. These developers are not his personal bitches, if he wants this feature he should do it himself or pay a developer to do it for him.

Re:WTF?

[Billly Gates]

Problem is simple.

IN FOSS people are not customers they are users. Plain and simple. People today are used to having people do it there way %100 of time whenever they purchase anything.

That is the difference.

You know what? Resources are limited and Gnome is doing the right thing by using the UI lab research donated by SUN.

Gnome hackers can not accomidate every user. It can't be done. But if a majority of users want something then it will be implemented. This would have been a better reply and more "business like".

What is cool about opensource is someone can have the power to change it if the majority is not interested. This woman does not realize that and perhaps the gnome guys should have told her that. In the meantime its back to work for the majority of users.

Free as in speech... not as in freedom

[CaptainPinko]

if you don't have the posibility to excercise the freedom then it's not really free. If you don't have the requisite coding skills or money to pay for a developer then the open code is worth butt-kiss. In this case (as with proprietary software, hell even more so!) you are stuck with whatever the developers choose to do. True, they don't owe you anything... but that doesn't help out the poor end user now does it? Frankly, OSS was developed by hackers for hackers, and was not meant for the casual user. The only benefit I really see is the use of open standards but proprietary products do that too. Really, few companies can afford to customize their distro and are reliant on Redhat, Madrake , Suse etc. The Joe Blow Linux desktop is a faery tale. That said I still love OSS and use it daily... but I'm the intended audience (a hacker with w/ m4|) sk1llz).

Re:Free as in speech... not as in freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Frankly, OSS was developed by hackers for hackers, and was not meant for the casual user. >>

Which is why my housewife mom uses firefox and thunderbird, my quality manager dad firefox, my medical professional wife and I, a writer, linux with ff, tb and oo.org?

Re:Free as in speech... not as in freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

I notice this is a tad off-topic, but... My mother just started using computers a couple of months ago, and is currently on Ubuntu/Gnome.
That is all. She uses it successfully, is happy, and doesn't complain. Now, unless your l33t-meter is set to excedingly low, I can hardly understand how she can qualify to "m@d sk1llz 1337 h@X0r |\/|0m".
Please don't preach about how l33t one has to be to use linux in daily tasks. Thanks to projects like Gnome you don't have to.

Re:Free as in speech... not as in freedom

[QuantumG]

Ya know, we have these companies (Suse, Redhat, etc) which will happily take your money for a distribution of Linux. Anything you suggestion to them is likely to get implemented as it will make you buy the next version of their distribution.

You're not "customers"

[the_skywise]

You're "fans".

That's the "dark underbelly" of OSS. The creators of Gnome didn't necessarily do it for money. They did it for love of implementing their vision and you're along for the ride.

It's a "good idea"(tm) to listen to your fans and adjust designs accordingly. You have to do this if this is your bread and butter for making your livelihood. (IE when you're getting paid for this) But if you feel strongly in your vision over fans complaints than that's your prerogative. As a fan, your choice is to switch to something else or change a fork to the way you like it or pay somebody to do it for you. The code is completely and utterly open for you to do this. (That's the bright side of OSS)

If Gnome pisses off enough people that they stop using Gnome then something better may come along. But they're not bound to community responsibility.

Re:You're not "customers"

[Leo McGarry]

That's just wacky.

We all know what the words mean, right? A fan is somebody who is an enthusiastic devotee of something. A customer is somebody who takes a good or service that's offered for use.

People who use Gnome aren't fans. They're customers. They aren't enthusiastic about it. They just use it. (Can you find exceptions? Sure, but don't be fooled into thinking that they prove the point.)

Want to be successful? Start treating your customers as customers, not as buddies or pals or fans.

Don't care about being successful? Then for Christ's sake, can we please stop all the nonsense about how Linux is going to take over the world and go back to treating it as what it is: a hobby project.

Re:You're not "customers"

[fymidos]

Although gnome has lost the point for some time now, it is hardly what you would call a "community" project. It is not even a project from devs for devs. It tries hard to be easy for non-techies.

It has been widely supported and influenced by *companies*: HP wants it to be their next standard desktop, ximian built a business around it, Redhat still offers it as the default environment (!?!?!).

Bottom line: gnome does not follow anymore the development practises of an open source project, the majority of which listen really *really* carefully to their users.

Re:You're not "customers"

[DexterF]

Yeah, like you can just fork a spinoff and expect everybody to use it like they are supposed to care. The "it's open, change it if you don't like it" attitude certain folks like to cling to when somebody pointed out "xy is crap and needs improvement" doesn't work that way. In the end it's the developers who decide which way to go and I've seen projects receiving fine patches but the devs rejected them because god knows what reason. No time, didn't understand the code etc. So - make a fork with your patches? Ok. The next moment you'll find yourself trying to catch up with the original single handed when they release new versions. Did you have the time to gather a developer team around you in no time? Probably not. Do you have the resource to adapt the software for all distributions out there like debian, SuSE, SLES, RH, FC, Slackware if you're cool, etc etc.? While maintaining the software? And making progress? Nope. Only works if the project you forked from is doomed like XFree86 was when the XOrg genie popped outta the bottle. So it's sink or swim. And even if someone has the time to do all this - who's coder enough to form a project like Gnome? 1 out of how many users? Only my 0.02 about "it's open, change it"

Re:You're not "customers"

[SA Stevens]

HP wants it to be their next standard desktop

Sun has already done so.

Re:You're not "customers"

[Ogerman]

As an Open Source developer myself, I hold the following philosophy when it comes to the use of my free time: "Because I am sacrificing a great deal of my time, I must evaluate its use. My time is highly valuable and I could be readily making money instead. If I'm going to freely spend some of this time for OSS, it should be spent in a way that helps the most people. After all, if I didn't care, I would just run Windows and stick with my day job -- that's the easy way out. Instead I desire to help people and advance technological freedom in our society by providing superior alternatives to proprietary software. The only way for this to happen is for me to listen to what my users want and weigh this heavily in my decision making. Sometimes they are flat wrong. Other times their ideas are brilliant. Regardless, if I don't listen, I will not produce quality software because it will only meet my own needs and/or the inaccurate perceived needs of my userbase. If I do listen to my users, my project will someday be popular enough that I can make money through support and paid enhancements. I don't wish to become rich, but I would like to make a living while doing what I love. If I could work full time on OSS, it would be beneficial to my userbase. My ultimate dream is to see OSS dominate computing for the benefit of all -- even those who today are the enemies of our ideals. Everyone in the OSS community must play their part, do their best, hold the right attitudes, and keep the big picture in mind."

For me, there always has to be a balance. Gaining more users is almost always more important than trying something new and whacky that may or may not work out. If I'm going to try something new, it should be a user-selectable option. The old should remain the default until the new is readily accepted. Flexibility is more important than the threat of bloat, but proper design takes care of both.

Re:You're not "customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

HP stepped off of GNOME a few years ago.

Re:You're not "customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not "fans" or "customers." Customers pay. They're just users. Or, more generously, "patrons."

I wish I had some +mod points for you

[ishmalius]

This makes the thing so succinct and clear. Bless you.

But, really.. Being a contributor to several projects, I can add this point that people have missed: the developer is likely working on other items already, and does not have the additional time to add a particular feature for a user. We basically perform a "feature triage" to find the best returns on our time and efforts. It is not ignoring anyone.

5 year olds...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gimme my feature, give it now!
WAAAAHAAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAHAHAHAAAAAA
MOMMY!!! the overworked unpaid developer won't give me my feature
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH

silly rabbit.... tricks are for kids...

I have a simple solution

[avdi]

I'd be happy to implement missing features in FOSS applications in return for money.

I don't understand why the bounty system never caught on for FOSS...

Re:I have a simple solution

[Cid Highwind]

I don't understand why the bounty system never caught on for FOSS...

A programmer's time is expensive. If we mere users had the money to pay bounty-coders to fix all the things that annoy us about FOSS, we would have bought G5 PowerMacs instead of stripped down PeeCees without Windows.

I'm only half kidding...

Unfixed bugs

[Jagasian]

Nautilus is still slow and crashes all the time. Hell, the file alteration monitor is also _still_ broken. Save a file to your desktop and it doesn't show up without a manual refresh of the desktop. Evolution is notorious for sucking up hundreds of megs of RAM and slow performance... it also locks up every now and then. Oh and I love how the terminal has had the same damn bug for years now! In a maximized window, scrolling can cause the text to become unreadable.

However, the biggest pain in Gnome has got to be Nautilus. It has always been and continues to be slow, buggy, crash proned, and a memory hog. Don't even get me started on the "spatial mode" crap, which is forced down our throats.

Re:Unfixed bugs

[shish]

which is forced down our throats.

Yes, forced. Except you can turn it off. Or you could even avoid natilus altogether, and go with one of the many other file managers -- It's linux, just pick & mix the best bits as you see fit, and stop complaining about being forced to use things where there are alternatives...

Fork YOU!

[Anonymous Coward]

but what are you going to do? ... It's FREE!!!!

Bitching is free, too.

And it's all non-developer end users can actually do.

yeah yeah

[sethadam1]

Everytime an article links to OSNews, 26 people have to chime in about why should they care what Eugenia thinks.

But the fact remains: If Gnome wants to increase userbase, they must satisfy basic needs and address the concerns of at least some portion of their users, not just one subsection, like corporate users. If they don't, they should at least have a simple way to allow users to share feedback. Bugzilla is NOT that way.

Perhaps it is true that Gnome, or any large OSS project, can't cater to all users, but how do they know what the "majority" of users even want? Certainly not by viewing the Bugzilla feature requests. Bugzilla is for developers. Real users wants a dead-ease feedback page that doesn't require registration.

Love her or not, Eugenia is right on on this one. And I am right on.... to XFCE.

All those hits...

[Anonymous Coward]

Eugenia's employers love her.

What Gets Developed

[buckhead_buddy]

I don't think this is unique to Open Source software. As a person who develops for Macs, a bit of Windows, and some free software in my spare time I see user demands made all the time. There are three things I need before I develop something:

• Motivation - without this (or a contract binding you) the work inevitably languishes
• Ability - An idea may be great but if it's not already something I can do or think I can learn to do, it's not feasible for me to do it.
• Resources - Other things (health, family, paying jobs) have higher priority. Is it realistic of me to volunteer for this?

I frequently hear from users who want something but have no idea how it would be implemented. They throw out the idea (e.g. "a voice driven paint program!") and instantly expect the same fervor that struck them will strike me.

What's worse is when they don't take "No" as an acceptable answer. There are so many times I've seen people be bullied in to saying "Yes" and then only get a half-implemented, half-assed, crappy result. Thus disappointing everyone involved, hurting their own reputation, and discouraging other developers who want to work on the same idea if they have to follow in your failed precedent.

I like development ideas. I really hate it when I have developed a new skill or mastered a new api and I have zero idea about how I could usefully work with it. But for working on someone else's idea, the motivation, ability, and resources have to be there or I'm just going to end up screwing yet another pooch. (so to speak)

Re:What Gets Developed

[evilviper]

They throw out the idea (e.g. "a voice driven paint program!") and instantly expect the same fervor that struck them will strike me.

What's worse is when they don't take "No" as an acceptable answer. There are so many times I've seen people be bullied in to saying "Yes" and then only get a half-implemented, half-assed, crappy result.

You know something... I would very much like to see this half-implimented, voice-drive, paint program of yours.

Prediction...

[wondafucka]

...it's a nerd with low self esteem, wanting to start a mini-ego-battle on some feature / bugfix that didn't get done immediately after said nerd's submission.

Now to go RTA.

From the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks..

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitching is free, too.

And it's all non-developer end users can actually do.

Ahh.... an OSS developer posts on /.

Re:From the abundance of the heart the mouth speak

[Anonymous Coward]

HA! Although, in my (anonymous) defense, I didn't mean "bitching" pejoratively. I was trying to advocate. Cyncially.

Developers too

[trolleri]

Not only users, developers that would like to read about important API changes are in the shitter too!

Have you followed bonobos development documentation? A hint: it's easy reading..

True

[Espectr0]

What's the first question a user asks about using gnome?

Answer: how to disable spatial nautilus.

If gnome really cares for its users, the default would be OFF.

I like gnome, especially how fonts look, but attitude like this is silly

Exactly backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

Eugenia says:

In our article yesterday about "The Ten Worst Engineering Pitfalls" by Keith F. Kelly, on the No2 spot you will find this: "2. Basing the design on your own motives rather than on users' needs."

She uses this to argue that programmers should be user-driven -- but as Alan Cooper points out, this is exactly backwards. When a company is user-driven, they add a lot of little features and tweaks that each of their users asks for. Then they end up with a program that's intricate and complex and hard to use for *everybody*. (If it's a company, this is where their customers start leaving them for companies who take design seriously.)

No program (or system) can be perfect for all people. The successful ones are the ones that have a consistent design -- often this means doing one thing and doing it well. If you try to be all things to all people, you guarantee that you won't be much use to anybody. Attaching a shell to the bottom of every window is the ultimate in flexibility, but nobody would claim that it's the ultimate in usability.

The problem is that Eugenia seems to think "user-driven" is a good thing, whereas Cooper (who seems to have much more experience and success and believeable examples to back up his position) states quite emphatically that "user-driven" is a bad thing: you want to be *design-driven*.

Re:Exactly backwards

[Mr. McGibby]

I live by a saying:

Listen to your users, but don't do what they say.

Users are funny. They know that they want something, but most of the time they don't know what that is. Sometimes, when they think they know what that is, and they get what they want, they find out they didn't know what they wanted in the first place.

Programmers are also funny. They're human, but they act like computers. Some of them do exactly what a user tells them. The problem is that humans aren't computers.

I don't know why programmers seem to think that when a user asks for something, they should do exactly what the user tells them. This is plain nonsense. Why would the user know they best way to implement a feature? They're not programmers.

But Mr. Alan Cooper, whoever he is, is yet another arrogant engineer who forgets that his job is to make the life of his users easier. His job isn't to create the "perfect design" or design software in a vacuum. In the end, he supports the users in doing their work. Most software development should be user-driven, just not user-controlled.

Re:Exactly backwards

[BenjyD]

Alan Cooper is a well known UI expert. His comments on dealing with users are fairly similar to yours: design for the user, observe the user, but don't let the user do the design.

huh?

[SpongeBobLinuxPants]

I'm sorry, what was that? I wasn't paying attention.

Status?

[halleluja]

Probably a gnome-dev mailing list question but my senses tell me here I get some answers...

• What's the logic behind swapped OK and Cancel? Although I close windows right wm-button I look left first, and OK is in many cases the default I want.

  (Why is OK+Cancel standard? I should think OK+Cancel are never intuitive.)

• Why does every button have an icon (even OK,Cancel)? Is this some Borland relic?
• Why are file choosers separate widgets from Nautilus? I find it quite comfortable to do things like copy/paste/delete inside a file dialog.
• When do we get good orbit components like gecko, nautilus etc.?
• If windows really sucks and is just petty pretty, why is it comfortable and workable whilst gnome still sucks?
• http://www.windowmaker.org/

Kindest regards,

Miguel de Icaza

No.

[the_skywise]

A customer is somebody who BUYS a good or service that's offered for use. That's the difference.

Re:No.

[joshsnow]

A customer is somebody who BUYS a good or service that's offered for use. That's the difference.

RedHat. Novell. Sun. IBM. SUsE. Big names recognisable to a typical slashdotter. All customers of the GNOME project.

Thousands of smaller companies, world wide. Influenced by employees, who also happen to be GNOME fans, to buy GNOME based linux systems. All customers of the GNOME project via RedHat et al.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

> RedHat. Novell. Sun. IBM. SUsE. Big names
> recognisable to a typical slashdotter.
> All customers of the GNOME project.

To start:

- Hewlett Packard jumped off of GNOME,
- RedHat dropped GNOME for Fedora and concentrate on Servers,
- Novell is dealing with GNOME and KDE at the same time. Some of their major tools are written using KDE Desktop. I speak about the stuff that Novell writes and not what Ximian had written.
- Sun's contract on developing GNOME ends in a couple of months,
- IBM is focusing on KDE Development since they are a coop with SuSE,
- SuSE is thightly working with the KDE people. Some of them even paid by SuSE.

Re:No.

[hanwen]

RedHat. Novell. Sun. IBM. SUsE. Big names recognisable to a typical slashdotter. All customers of the GNOME project.

and guess what, all these companies in fact implement stuff for THEIR customers, by doing research on what those customers, and then implementing it.

Re:No.

[joshsnow]

Agreed. The point is that GNOME is now a commercial concern - a fact that scratch-an-itch developers often overlook.

If you do polls, do them right

[claes]

Most web polls I have seen are completely useless for serious decisions. If 400 users want this feature and 300 users want that feature, what difference does it make? It is easy to request features, but what is much more important is to have the right direction. What do users really want? What is most important? What tasks are most common? What must be easy, what can be made harder?

I think of these tests you get to do at certain job interviews. One question has four options, and you have to decide which statement you agree most with, and which statement you agree least with. And there are many of these questions, and the options are shuffled around to weigh each option against all others

"I think writing email is most important", "I think printing letters on paper is least important", "I think boot time is most important", "I subscribing to RSS feeds is least important".

If such a poll was done right, Gnome people could know if their current direction is aligned with their users opinion. And the other way around.

Mod me down for honesty:

[Anonymous Coward]

But I seriously wonder why anyone uses Gnome. The "less is more" approach to interfaces somehow has resulted in a lot of bloat. Many of the developers truly are elitist pricks.

Be honest - does anyone reading this think Havoc is *not* a sociopath?

Re:Mod me down for honesty:

[shish]

Because although bloated, it's less bloated than KDE's "more is more" approach? And how does a pricky dev team make for a bad end product?

Personally I just have E as WM with mostly Curses apps, and a little GTK whenever I need a GUI, and I'm happy with that.

OSNEWS & Eugenia

[ultrabot]

because the story so obviously belongs at -1, Troll

Well, it was a link from /. to an article at osnews, an article written by none other than Eugenia.

Of course it's a troll.

I also can't help but be annoyed by Eugenia claiming that "this is why Linux will never surpass Microsoft and apple". People like that think that by annoying people they can push them to work harder, and appear a kind of "hero" - in the "I gave them the push they needed" way.

Linux probably won't surpass MSFT any day soon, but when we get 20% desktop coverage I can safely say that Linux has kicked MSFT's ass :-).

Re:OSNEWS & Eugenia

[Anonymous Coward]

... but when we get 20% desktop coverage ...

You misspelled "if".

Lemme guess, that author was spoiled as a kid.

[dmouritsendk]

He doesn't have the sligtest clue about what he's writing about, seriusly he seems to think that the following:

A feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it, regardless of the number of votes it's received.

Mean that the developers will only make stuff which is very cool and elite. And talks of how linux isn't just for geeks anymore, well the gnome im using certaintly doesn't seem to be focused at geeks nor developers.

The fact he is missing, is clearly that the ideas that are coming from the gnome developers are idea they think will be "cool for a better user experince".

The GNOME team is a project composed of people with a interest in developing a easy to use DE for Linux, and they got a bunch of highly competent people in this area. I trust their judgement completely, and if one of these people don't think a feature is worth implementing or fit in to their grand plan you wont hear any complaining from me(since it probertly wasn't any good then). And it works, Windows and MacOSX are both developed internaly at microsoft and apple so according to the "logic" the author proposes(no user requested features == elite only software) they should be pure ASCII-art-driven geek paradises now.

Grow up mr. Author, the world doesn't stop because you get an idea.

Re:Lemme guess, that author was spoiled as a kid.

[joe_n_bloe]

Idiot.

I don't care how 1337 you are: If you want to write software that users want, you can't rely on your *theories* of what users want.

Don't hold the opinions of your non-developer users in contempt. If you think otherwise, you have your head up your ass.

-joseph

Re:Lemme guess, that author was spoiled as a kid.

[dmouritsendk]

Idiot.
You've hurt me feelings.

I don't care how 1337 you are: If you want to write software that users want, you can't rely on your *theories* of what users want.

You can be quite sure that a person(developer or otherwise) in charge of user experince of any GUI based app, has a pretty good idea of which of their theories/concepts that worked in practice and which didn't. And take steps accordingly.

There's a huge difference between this, and implementing what users want.

As an example, the spartial browsing. Not many of the computer-saavy users out there seemed to like it, and it quicky became everybody favorite object of bashing. But the funny thing, the two people I know that really like it are persons with out any real experince with computers (both are "seniors"). Ok then, it could seem the "theory" have some merits in the ease of use department. And also, the feature has been optional from the start. The reason that distros have it enable by default, is actually because they apperntly agree that its a good thing(eventhough powerusers hate it). Had there been a poll about "Should spartial die?", there would be no doubt of the outcome. But the gnome project is not about pleasing its power users, its about making a easy to use desktop enviroment. So what they've did, making it optional to use, is IMHO the best solution. If they've listened to their users, the would stray more from their own project goals that they would by using the current solution.

Which is bacially why the judgement of such things, should be in the hands of the developers and not the users.

Don't hold the opinions of your non-developer users in contempt. If you think otherwise, you have your head up your ass.

I'm curious, are you caplable of shades of grey or is it simply back and white in your world?

I've learned from experince, some(most) end-users are bacially *censored* and should'nt be taked too serious. But I do tend to listen to what other people have to say to me anyways, and if I think they make sence(in the greater context of things) I take them serious.

wow

[SQLz]

What a clueless bitch.

/usr/local/bin - 3 open windows in X

[x404x]

What are the developers thinking with each DIR opening in it's own window? Before long just checking your system in gnome 2.8 and higher you have all these open windows...just like WINDOWS 95. Come on people, EVERYOTHER WM - Windows too - had one window for browsing the filesystem. The new gnome windows 95 shit has got to go...I'm going to back to fluxbox when I update my suse install...

And you'd be very lucky...

[hsoft]

On those 100 people, to get the answer "It's not Linux! It's GNU/Linux!"

Boys and Girls, this is why Microsoft dominates

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy and Girls, this is why Microsoft dominates the desktop. Microsoft dominantes the desktop because it is the cheapest OS available that doesn't require a degree in CS to actually use.

As long as Linux developers have this kind of attitude, Linux will be relegated to the server room. USB hardware and network cards will not work for Linux. Laptops will not work for Linux and will be sold with a mandatory "Bill Gates tax". The desktop is a hard place to be; developers have to implement a large amount of code that does nothing useful to the coder but makes the code in question vastly easier to use.

Can Linux do this? I think so. KDE and Gnome are certaintly a step up from FVWM for the end user (yes, I agree FVWM may be better for power users). But Linux has a long way to go.

Just one example: When the Gnome file manager opens up one yes/no dialog; every single file manager window is unresponsive until that dialog is found and answered. This forces the user to stop their work and play hide and seek. We tried to get one of our workers to use Linux. The second time that happened, and he (rightfully so) cussed Linux out, we put him back in Windows.

File chooser anybody?

[nandhp]

Does this remind anybody of the new "improved human interface" file chooser? All the users threw a fit, and they still haven't fixed it yet?

As usual.

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical Slashdot attitude - fork it! Sure, fine, but then same folks are outraged why OSS software isn't being adopted well and why Microsoft is saying that OSS isn't ready for busineses.

Microsoft is going to use this statements in their PR campaings, and this time it won't be FUD!

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

She is quite the obnoxious bitch.

Hellbent on cloning the look of windows????

[Chineseyes]

KDE is hellbent on cloning the look and feel of windows???? When people make arguements like this about kde I really wonder if they've ever used KDE at all. Have you ever heard of themes you can make kde look however the hell you want so your arguement holds no water.

Re:Hellbent on cloning the look of windows????

[micolous]

KDE definitely feels like Windows to me. No flame intended, but using KDE feels like being a square plug being shoved into a round hole. Which basically describes how I feel when using Windows.

Look != feel. It doesn't matter if I can make KDE look like anything I like, it still doesn't change the feel.

Regarding the open-source software model

[Kergan]

Well... There are cheap coders. e.g. rentacoder.com

Frankly, I'm quite amazed that open-source projects don't use services such as these more often. Bugzilla could probably use more integration with these kinds services (say... as a web service). In addition to the "vote for this bug" feature, you could put an "add to the bounty" feature. That should solve most Gnome issues at blazing speed, with the proper integration. Moreover, Microsoft would likely have serious trouble competing with the model, and I might even give Linux another try and consider not calling it a sucky OS.

I knew it!

[sulli]

GNOME is catching up with Microsoft!

Irony...

[sterno]

The only things people can comment on his how they can't understand what the author is trying to say.

"his how"... Oh the irony...

Re:Irony...

[rhavyn]

How is a single typing error ironic compared to the shoddy articles on OSNews?

A more accurate title would be...

[Troy Baer]

"GNOME developers ignore Eugenia Loli-Queru's crackpot ideas"

The author of that OSNews article is trying to push her own agenda. She seems to think that GNOME should be doing focus group research, and has fairly specific ideas of how that should be done. When some of the GNOME devs pointed out that her ideas weren't workable in their opinions, she took it personally and kept trying to push her ideas -- without making any significant effort to refute the devs' points, I might add. Finally, people got so fed up with this discussion (which is pretty off-topic for the mailing list where it took place to start with) that they told her to take it elsewhere.

Underlying it all is a sense of entitlement, a feeling that her ideas are so good and so important that the GNOME devs should implement them without further discussion. Since she's neither a paying customer nor able/willing to develop the features she wants herself, the GNOME devs chose to ignore her... and rightly so, in my book.

Re:A more accurate title would be...

[QuantumG]

She doesn't understand open source, she never has, and she doesn't try to learn. The most funny part of her article is where she notes that there are companies who she can pay to care about her opinions but she chooses not to (and expects volunteers to care for free).

Re:A more accurate title would be...

[Quarters]

Don't forget that she ticked off the GNOME developers just last week by twisting the discussion on the mailing list to fit her misguided goal. Then she came here (and to her backwater web pet project, OSNews) and falsely claimed that a new window manager had been picked for 2.10.

Use what you like.

[Lord Kano]

If you like GNOME, use it. If you like KDE, use it. If you like WindowMaker, use it. See where I'm going with this?

I'm going to keep my preference to myself, because I don't want to enflame any faction of the WM/DE Jihad.

But no matter what your preference, just go with it. If developers start losing their user base, they'll start to question why.

LK

well, from osnews...

[matgorb]

Coming from OSnews where some so called reviewer can't even manage to do simple configuration in Ubuntu that my little brother mange by himself, well I will say, go back to that KDE yo love that much, after all you don't have to use it if you don't like it

She sure looks like one (and an incoherent one)

[Anonymous Coward]

Just look at her page at osnews:

http://www.osnews.com/editor.php?editors_id=1/

You can read, at the bottom of the page, she acting exactly like the people she is criticizing!

no, this is completely retarded!

[mrsbrisby]

Here are two fuckholes saying "Work for free, or don't make useful programs!"

Free software is not about getting software without paying for it, it's about making sure that when you DO pay for it, you will always have it!

I don't understand why that's so hard for people who are just being introduced to the Fedoras and the FreeBSDs of the world.

If you don't know how to write software, you can always learn! If you don't want to learn, consider making a bounty for the things you want.

They don't seem to understand the very basic concept that if they want a better Free desktop, then someone has to pay for it.

They also don't seem to understand that those wants are subjective.... Some users feel like they already have all the free desktop that they need

You're the same fuckheads that sue PBS for misappropriating public interests but never made a donation.

You make me sick.

About 20% of GNOME patches are not even reviewed.

[synthespian]

Hi --

People like to give often the be-thankful-shut-up-and-code-and-submit-patches standard answer, but I would like to know if not even reviewing 19% of patches as evidenced here is "acceptable" (i.e., widely practised) or is there a problem?
How do other FLOSS projects stack-up against each other on this measurement?

Re:If only this WERE K5...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.bartleby.com/64/C001/061.html

Two schools of thought...

[Lendrick]

It's always interesting to see the two schools of thought on this:

1. STFU and Fork It - While I disagree with this (for reasons I will outline below), I agree that this is a valid point. For the most part, the people working on these projects are working entirely for free. As such, they have no real "customers" per se, because no one is paying them any money. Hence, they have no real obligation to care or even notice when someone suggests a new feature. The users, who are using software (for free) which was written on donated time, have no right to complain if it doesn't do exactly what they want.

2. Listen to your Users - Forking a project is fundamentally hard. You need, at bare minimum, a ton of extra time, skill in the language(s) the project was written in, and a working knowledge of the project's code base. Additionally, when a project is as widespread as GNOME, it's next to impossible to get any notable linux distributions to include your fork instead of the trunk. X.Org managed to pull this off, but only with the help of a large number of developers. When you tell someone to "STFU and Fork It", you're telling them to do the following:

1. Quit their day job.
   
2. Learn C/C++ along with whatever other libraries the project is based on
   
3. Become familiar with the project itself
   
4. Gather a bunch of other developers who are prominent enough that the community at large will notice
   
5. Work through the politics of getting your fork included in some Linux distros
   

That's a lot harder than just opening up a text editor, magically finding the right place to add your little snippit of code, and recompiling.

The spatial browsing controversy was what finally convinced me to give up GNOME for KDE. The straw that broke the camel's back was a very condescending article in favor of it that essentially claimed that anyone who didn't like the spatial file manager was using their computer wrong; however, since version 2.0, GNOME has had a history of removing configurability in favor of what the developers believed was simplicity, despite the vehement objections of their user base. The spatial file manager ordeal was just a stark example of a larger pattern.

For those of us who are trying to advocate Open Source, it would be really nice if certain developers were more willing to listen to their users. As a matter of policy, it would be a good idea to set apart a portion of the dev team whose specific duty it is to to proactively study and implement (with a how-can-we-make-your-experience-better attitude, as opposed to stfu-and-do-it-your-goddamn-self) feature requests. Why? Not because you necessarily owe people anything, but because people use your product, and it would be nice if you cared about them.

In the meantime, I've switched to KDE, which has shown itself to be far more responsive to the needs of its users. As things are going right now, GNOME will either adapt to the market or become obsolete, much like X did.

Re:Two schools of thought...

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because that KDE you're running isn't using X at all.

Asshat.

Re:Two schools of thought...

[Trifthen]

Actually I wonder why anyone advocates number 1, unless the core developers are just absolute tools. The feeling I get is that the core developers of Gnome are generally respected. So why does it seem like anyone defending them would rather risk another X.Org reaction, than maybe listen a little?

This happens to a lot of open source projects I see. They languish for a while in response to user complaints, and someone forks it. The fork becomes more popular than the original branch, and the original developers get left out in the cold for their troubles. Why do we encourage this? What is with the STFU AND FORK IT attitude, anyway?

Re:Two schools of thought...

[arose]

Someone already forked Gnome, and it does not look like it's going anywhere. Also emember that part of the X.Org reaction was the license change of XFree86.

She already contributed

[bonch]

She offered her opinion on a public, high-traffic website. It even got posted to Slashdot.

It's up to the devs if they want to pay attention to it or not.

Call me an idiot...but not "Surely".

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you want a feature put in an open source product, either do it yourself, wait for someone to do it, or pay someone to do it for you. But never ever ever expect someone to do it for you for free."

And people wonder why the "Information just wants to be free" trolls piss artists off.

Re:Call me an idiot...but not "Surely".

[Anonymous Coward]

'Course, it's hard to keep information that exists from getting out. Seems to be hilariously easy to prevent people from getting ahold of code that they haven't written and don't want to write.

I'd say the programmers are in a much better position to deal with this kind of argument than artists are. Fucking hippies should get real jobs anyway.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got music and movies to steal.

Re:Call me an idiot...but not "Surely".

[Anonymous Coward]

Or buy Windows which has all those features and more already built in.

Using Gnome is like using a 10 year old OS. There's a lot better out there!

Gnome really does renforce the addage: You get what you pay for...

Well d'uh...

[palfrey]

"A feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it"

Of course. For those of us not living in magic pixie land, a user doesn't just request a feature, wave a wand over the CVS tree and a feature appears out of thin air... However, there are various ways to get a developer to do a feature

1) The developer thinks of the idea and does it
2) You are paying the developer's salary and want something done (or have persuaded those paying said salary)
3) The developer is persuaded this is a good idea. Ways include: providing example cases for why this feature would be good, adding items to the Bugzilla about the feature (if you can't be bothered doing that, don't ask others to put their time in building things for you), *talking* to the relevant developer and explaining any questions they may have about your requested feature, etc.

Commercial software only does 1) and 2). Be happy you've got 3) as well.

Like Slashdot?

[bonch]

See post subject. Also, see the bad English in your own post!

Let us [pop a cap, into those] Gnome [asses]

[Anonymous Coward]

"So, OSS foundations, don't promote your project that way unless you want users to expect you to pay attention to them. Developers, don't participate in projects of that sort if you can't handle users wanting the project to be useful. In the most general terms I can think of, don't publish your work on the internet if you can't handle criticism."

Obviously, since Darwin hasn't done a "drive by" on the developers. It's pretty safe to assume that Gnome is useful to enough people. It's just not useful to those who really want Knome.

Re:Let us [pop a cap, into those] Gnome [asses]

[nine-times]

It's pretty safe to assume that Gnome is useful to enough people.

Nothing I've written should be read as a criticism of Gnome as software. I use it and like it quite a lot. I'm only questioning the right of people to push the product of their labor into the public arena and then complain that people can't criticize because it's their personal hobby.

A small summary of why this is not a big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

From the GNOME desktop-devel-list:


I currently have 20 feature requests for Gnome 2.12. Where should I place them? The Bugzilla is not where I want to place them because:
a. no one will pay attention ultimately (gazillion of feature requests never go anywhere there, let along bug reports)
b. I don't want to spend half an hour placing 20 features requests on the bugzilla one by one.
Is there a better way for users to ask for features requests for 2.12? Maybe a special wiki that has "time restrictions" (e.g. only be able to post there for 2 weeks and then have the devs reading these requests and implement some of them for 2.12)?


Notice the highlighted section. This is - if you have seen Eugenia in the past - typical of how she acts pretty much anywhere she goes. She make some suggestions (some of them very good) and then never wants to go through the proper channels to have those suggestions heard. She usually just posts to the mailing lists and then bitches how no one listens to her.

I wonder if she is like this in real life also.

more bloatless

[bug1]

Do you mean quite often there is less bloat ?

You could have just said "less bloat"

Re:more bloatless

[Lisandro]

Yes, i could - i just fucked up. English is my second language, i need sleep and clients have been bugging me all day now.

Lighten up guys.

OSS is Free Market Capitalism, not Communist

[cheesybagel]

She got the usual mistake, that open source software was communism. Like Marx said:
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!

But that is *not* the open source motto. This quote from Saint-Simon captures the essence:
Each according to his capacity! Each capacity according to its works!

A pure meritocracy of the able, not communism of the masses.

Combine it with the free market provided by open source, which enables both universal competition and the ability for coopetition and you have pure free market capitalism.

The capital of the open source market can be tangible (money, beer, chocolate, hardware, etc) or intangible (code, patches, bug reports, feature requests, documentation, help, etc).

Idle rants from Eugenia are not capital. They are just hot air.

Re:OSS is Free Market Capitalism, not Communist

[anechoic]

you are confusing the term 'capital' with the organizing forces of 'capitalism' which is predicated on the concept of profit made from the surplus labor of a workforce...also, not all markets are capitalist and goods which are traded are not considered 'capital'...

That's not geeky

[melted]

Geeky would mean the same thing but _without_ the instructions.

Re:That's not geeky

[Anonymous Coward]

Or in Engrish, sometimes that is worse then having no instructions.

TRANSLATION

[bonch]

Translation: "If you don't like it, unless you're a software developer with knowledge of the internal codebase of GNOME, fuck off! We don't cater to user requests, we only cater to developers who can fork source trees on a whim."

Assholes, indeed.

Different set of rules.

[Anonymous Coward]

"First, open source developers are increasingly describing their projects as user-oriented, enterprise-ready, etc. Now, I have nothing against hobby development in which users are not a concern because it's purely for enjoyment. Heck, given the choice I'd ignore users' requests and just work on projects of interest to me in my job if I could. But if you're going to do that, be honest about it. Don't describe your software as user-oriented, because it's not. Make it explicit that it's a hobby project, and you have no real interest in the desires of your user base."

Wow! Now if we could only get closed-source to play by those rules.

Then...

[bonch]

If OSS projects are just created on a whim and we're fans "along for the ride," then don't complain when OSS projects aren't taken as seriously as commercial projects who are fully devoted to fulfilling the users' needs.

That's one of the things I really don't understand about OSS. Complain when things aren't taken as seriously in the mainstream, but then complain when people start to take a project more seriously as a product for users.

Re:Then...

[26199]

Since when are commercial projects devoted to fulfilling user needs? Maybe slightly moreso than some open source projects, but for the most part all you see is devotion to making money.

Proprietary file formats and tactics to force upgrades are a good example of this.

like the splash screen contest

[maryjanecapri]

this contest was pretty much a joke. instead of getting the opinions of the people that actually use GNOME the splash screen contest:

1. didn't post the judging criteria
2. didn't use any judges other than those that run the footnotes site
3. didn't listen to the feedback they received regarding the winning choice
4. shunned a good amount of popular opinion

i could go on but i won't. i was a proud GNOME user for years until it seemed the GNOME developers stopped hearing our cries. for example - the gpilotd project failed and when the users cried out - no one seemed to listen. all the while the KDE developers were busy taking in all the feedback from their user base and, when their next version was released, it was obvious they took that feedback to heart. i honestly don't know what the issue is. GNOME used to be (from my point of view) the desktop of the "common man" for the Linux community. not so any more. now it's become about as user-unfriendly as possible (i.e. spatial file managers and hard-to-create desktop icons). when is this going to change? or is it? is KDE going to become the defacto standard for more and more users while GNOME finds itself being used only by those the develop it? it seems to me that GNOME is now what Linux was nearly a decade ago - a project for the elitist/hobbiest/hacker and not the masses.

Re:like the splash screen contest

[dash2]

Well, I swapped the other way and I now use Gnome not primarily for developing but for a standard office desktop. And its simple to use and easy on the eye. But I respect your choice.

Clarification

[CaptainPinko]

I said "Frankly, OSS was developed by hackers for hackers, and was not meant for the casual user.". I did not say it was not usable for them, just that they are not the intended target. It's like lubricating a gear with shampoo. It might work, but it's not it's intended purpose. When OSS works for Joe Average more often than not this is because of coincidence rather than design.

Please don't take this as a troll... I love this model. I test and write bug reports for betas of my favourite apps to guarantee I get the best user experience I can. A few patches, a few reports, the occaisional request and I get what I want... but that's bcause I'm not Joe Blow but play along the hacker game. Frankly, unless you know how to write bug-reports or have very basic needs that everyone else has, you will never get everything you need working perfectly.

Remindes me, I got a report to write about Perl syntax highlighting in Kate.

Double standards.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I think the GP posters thought was not so much writing code as contributing in some way. If she took the time to do a comprehensive user survey and analyze the data, presenting the most relavent topics to the Devs in such a way that substantiates what the users need and why, then she'd not be trolling."

Why? None of the people who usually criticize Gnome (here and elsewere) do so?

Here's another thought:

[Lendrick]

Perhaps this has been done already, perhaps it would be possible for a trusted group of people to start up a feature bounty site. People could place money in escrow to encourage developers to work on certain features. If enough people want something, the money will accumulate, and developers will start to take personal interest.

If this has already been done, do people who work on the major open source projects (GNOME, KDE, Firefox, OpenOffice, etc) actually look at it?

I hate to say it...but

[Chanc_Gorkon]

As much as Eugenia Loli-Queru has nutty ideas, I happen to agree with her. If Open Source developers, especially the ones who wokr for companies, need to look at waht the users are saying and if they aren't going to develop it, at least come up with a reason why. I know I know, that's not the way Open Source is supposed to work...well...yeah, your right. The thing is, users especially non technical ones do have a point as well. Open Source needs to grow up a little bit. Now that the cool stuff has been worked on or already has lots of developers working on it, the boring stuff needs to be worked on too. Telling a user to submit code is ridiculous. I agree with someone else that a Bugzilla for feature requests is needed and that should be the place for users to communicate what they want. That should be the place for developers, new and old, to go and find some ideas besides their own. For every developers one idea, two of the users ones should be worked on. The users do have to use it and Eugenia is right...most users have no use for the source and could care less....they just want what they want.

Even a blind hen finds a grain

[bw5353]

Even though the original article in no way is a clear and fully correct analysis of what is going on in OSS, there may be some truth to it.

For how many years has Linux been promoted as a desktop system that "very, very soon" will take a big leap? How big a percentage of the client market does Linux actually have today?

There must be a reason that it just seems to never take off (or rather, that it is in a constant state of taking off, but never gets into the air). TFA may point to one crucial problem: too few developers who care about non geek users.

And no, I do not think it is the only problem, but I would think it is as important as many others.

An Idea

[aCapitalist]

We've all heard about bounties, but how about extending it out a bit.

You set up a system where anybody is allowed to request a feature. At some point in time, popular features bubble up and a group of people appointed/elected or whatever mark the feature as "desirable".

At that point people are allowed to paypal (or whatever) to an escrow account for that feature request.

If by a certain date (set by who I don't know), said feature is implemented and concluded to have implemented the feature in a manner that can fit in with the rest of the code, the developer(s) are paid. If it's not implemented properly, the people get their money back.

Whining

[Anonymous Coward]

I just noticed this in Eugenia's bio at OSNews:

Whining about something I can't radically improve overnight, is not an option.

Perhaps she forgot that part?

Not news

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody should know by now that gnome follows guidelines before listening to its users.

Re:Not news

[Anonymous Coward]

> gnome follows guidelines

Adolf Hitler - Mein Kampf yes, actually they do.

Gnome file dialogs

[goofyheadedpunk]

Perhaps a bit offtopic, maybe not. We are sort of talking about gnome usability here.

Does anyone know how I can get gnome file dialogs to see dot directories, such as ".enlightenment". I upgraded to the GIMP 2.2 recently, and boy was I ever shocked to have such a useless peice of crap save/open dialog to use.

I believe I read here on /. that there was some way of editing gconf to get the dialogs to be usable again. Anyone have any clue? I'm not a clueless "noob", I can read the friendly manual, but I just cannot find anything dealing with this.

Re:Gnome file dialogs

[Stalyn]

i dunno about you but i can right click on the file list and a menu pops up. pick Show Hidden Files.

keep in might, this is with gtk 2.6.x.

Re:Gnome file dialogs

[norweigiantroll]

In relationship to this, does anyone know if it's possible to disable the new dialog boxes, or get the old functionality back?

It used to be super-quick to find any file on my system, just by type "~/docs" and tabbing my way into the appropriate directories. In the new dialog, even with that Ctrl-F garbage you can't get into directories, it's annoying as hell.

Re:Gnome file dialogs

[arose]

It's Ctrl-L, at least get your keybindings right before complaining. I think that the Gnome developers would be more likely to respond to thought out feature requests in bugzilla than uninformed rants on slashdot.

Boohoo

[Anonymous Coward]

"Noone else likes my fantastic and expensive OS of choice, so I take every opportunity to tell them how my fantastic and expensive OS was first with everything good."

Boohooo, boohoooooo

Seriously dude, that was old 10 years ago and it isn't any newer now. If it was indeed better, people would use it. Just look at the iPod.

I think I'll have to switch to that sig me too, the one I've seen around here about not having any problems with Macs, but hating Mac users. That is so nailing the problem with Apple.

Can't stand gnomes........

[pharwell]

Disgusting creatures, really.

Outstanding opinion piece

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not my words, but that of what is looks a Microsoft employee.

Have a look at this post
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=99 33&off set=120&rows=135#345773

The '.microsoft.com' is in plain english (no IDN ambiguity).

Elitism does exist in the OSS community.

[UranusReallyHertz]

I've been a Slashdot reader for many years now an I have been struck by certian reader's attitudes about software. The most sriking have been the people who flat out REFUSE to run any software that isn't open source. Reminds me of hardcore Vegans. Also the people don't understand why most people have NO DESIRE WHATSOEVER to compile there own software. Some people are really out of touch.

wandering off topic...

[c64k]

I don't use Gnome anymore. Or KDE. Both are big and bloated, and get in the way of what I moved to Linux for. To get things done, faster and easier. Fancy, pretty widgets that slow my machine down do not help me get things done.

Ultimately its the Devs Project

[Lodragandraoidh]

There is no responsiblity for the developers of Open Source / Free software to fill every need of every user (or even the needs of the majority of users). They only have to scratch their own itch - which is primarily what they do (unless of course, they are paid by someone to write open-source).

That being said, if there is a real need that is not being 'filled' by a particular project and the issue is urgent enough someone will fork the project to satisfy the need. We have seen it before in the past and we will see it again in the future.

Each project is different due to the personalities involved. While I agree that everyone can and will have their concerns heard if they desire (via publication on various websites - such as /. - or even in traditional media), that does not mean that the developers are in any way beholden to those users. That is as it should be; the developers, by and large, are not doing this for you, they are doing it for themselves - and your enjoyment or dislike of solutions they pick is only a side effect. If they are wrong (or perhaps 'unpopular' is a better term to use) then the fork will gain wider acceptance than the original development line and the original will become irrelevant.

There is no need to get worried or angry about it - unless, of course you have a vested interest in changing the direction of, or forking the development. I am not going to lose any sleep over it - because I will either continue to use Gnome as it exists in the current development path, or select the new fork (if there is enough interest to fork it) if I desire the allegedly 'missing' functionality.

The sky is not falling. Find something more interesting to run please.

Usability ignored

[Aragorn992]

Anyone who knows anything about usability principles knows that user involvement is the #1 most important thing.

"Corporate Culture" problem?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

These people are coding this on their own free time, for their own enjoyment.

I was under the impression that Gnome development was heavily backed by corporations (e.g. Sun), implying that at least some of the coders were paid to work on Gnome.

I occasionally wonder if all these complaints about the developers being "elitist" or "not paying attention to what the users want" (or being accused of insisting that whatever they decide is what the users want) has something to do with that. The complaints seem to mirror the sorts of complaints that more proprietary corporate-driven development gets. Is the corporate backing for Gnome affecting some of the developer's outlooks?

Purely speculation. For my part, I'd be trying out Gnome myself if it weren't such a pain to figure out all of the interdependencies in the umpteen little libraries that make it up...whether the the interface for Gnome is really good or bad I've got no idea...

Re:"Corporate Culture" problem?

[tedrlord]

In the article, the author mentioned the corporations. They made a statement that they will add in features that are helpful to their clients, but not otherwise. Since the clients are generally business-oriented, the normal user won't get much support from that arena.

Usually the complaints about elitism are because the developers get snippy at the users' suggestions. It's most likely due to very disparate points of view, where the users see the developer as they would a software company and feel they should be ready to support and improve their product based on consumers' input. The developer, on his part, think the users are rude because he built the software on his own time and provided it freely, then all he gets back is negative feedback on all the things people didn't like.

Parent poster hit it on the nose

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent poster hit things square on the nose. Gnome developers did say there were interested in user feedback, but Eugenia either disregarded them or deliberately twisted what they said when she posted her "Gnome developers don't want to listen to user feedback" article (she was miffed that they didn't give her special treatment and/or that they didn't do things her way).

Here's an incomplete list of examples from the very thread that spawned the article:

Havoc said:

"We [are interested in user feedback], but we have better ways to find out than web polls.

I'm interested in what your features are, because I like as much data as possible. But I'm not going to be surprised or think it reflects any
fundamental breakage in GNOME if nobody gets around to those features. There are only enough developers to implement maybe 1% of what gets
requested."

Federico stated:

"In general, field research would be more beneficial in the long run. Real users --- random people who go to Brazilian Telecentros, office clerks in European cities --- don't know where to report their annoyances with free software. They don't have time to find out about
it as they just want to get things done. You have to go to them, ask them, and watch them use the software."

Bastien said:

"I usually implement features when they are unintrusive, make the software easier to use, and when people ask nicely for them, without spamming or rambling on about them."

Shaun added:

"The problem with all these voting systems is that they have sample bias written all over them. The majority of users, real users, don't go onto bugzilla, and they don't vote in web polls on osnews. Market research is not the same thing as polling the enthusiast community...

And I *did* implement a voting system for Yelp features, but nobody voted"

Pesky users.

[devfsadm]

You know someone here mentioned the GNOME Mailing Lists http://mail.gnome.org/archives/ an I searched for Eugenia and it seems that she was trying to change Gnome but, the developers were actually writing back to her giving her explanations as to why they could not do things she wanted. Eugenia seems to just bug the krap out of these poor guys and is just pissed off becuase the developers told her to "pack sand" and gave rather goood explanations. All her article is is a freaking rant. The only good thing that it brought out was the fact that yes we should never forget the end-user when developing. BUT the end user has to realize that they are not going to get every single little thing that is asked for. Gnome is doing an great job for what is being asked of them. After reading some of her request on Gnome mailing list she seems like a spoiled rotton end user that has never been told no. And after being told NO she is using her position as Editor-in-Chief at http://www.OSNews.com to rant.

Completely backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

This opinion is completely back asswards.

The main job of an open source maintainer is to say "No." If every user's opinion was taken into consideration, there would exist no usable software. Everything would be utterly bogged down in useless features and preferences just because one person asked for them.

This is what plagues commerically developed software. This software exists solely to make its creators money. Therefore, the software is very heavily influenced on what corporate purchasors look for, and user feedback is given more attention that it deserves. Who knows someone who's used as much as a quarter of Microsoft Word's features? All those worthless features were something that at one point someone said "I think I should be able to..." and it was added. And Microsoft got another few thousand dollars.

What the increasing popularity of open source software (notably Firefox) has proven is that people just want to do what they want, without a ton of other crap getting in their way. The only way to do this is to have a maintainer that says "no" to a lot of user feedback.

A very large set of users dictating the feature sets of open source applications will bloat them. Often times, just as many people want one feature as the opposite (how the fuck did button ordering in GNOME become such a huge deal?) A small subset of those users, the "people in charged" are much better equipped to make all the decisions. If you completely disagree with their design philosophies that much, you wouldn't be using their software anyway.

To paraphrase Linus: "The question isn't 'why not add this feature?' the question is 'why can we not live without this?"
To paraphrase Eugenia: "I'm a self-absorbed twat"

Re:Completely backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

"The main job of an open source maintainer is to say "No." "

Hey, I'm sure that MS would love this if it were true. It would stop all OSS development.

Re:Completely backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

"To paraphrase Linus: "The question isn't 'why not add this feature?' the question is 'why can we not live without this?""

Given that were many fine Unix-based OS's available including no-cost and open source versions, the answer to Linus question with regard to Linux is "we can live without it".

More than unimplemented features

[jmv]

I started using gnome when 0.13 was released because I already liked the desktop better than KDE at that time. Unfortunately, when gnome 2.0 came out, I found out that most features/options I found useful in gnome 1 were gone. It got so annoying that I ended up switching to KDE 3 (which I can't say I like that much). All I heard was along the lines of "this feature isn't part of a good user interface". As far as I'm concerned gnome 1 was much better than gnome 2 (except for anti-aliased fonts of course).

Some of the annoyances I'm talking about:
- No more virtual desktops (switching from sawfish to metacity)
- Panel auto-hide sucks (takes forever to come back again and time preference is gone)
- New filemanager in 2.8 takes forever to open correctly just because I have lots of files in my home directory (that's on a 1.6 Pentium-M) ...and many other

Sometimes I'm really wondering if the gnome developers are really using their desktops (without many custom fixes).

Re:More than unimplemented features

[evilviper]

You really nailed it. Gnome 1.x was simple, fast, etc. I wasn't a big fan for long because it was too unstable for me at the time. Now, it's an obfusticated bloated interface. It seems like it might be becomming the next CDE, which is rather ironic, considering that much of GNOME seems to be mirroring CDE, including the companies involved. With 2.x, I haven't even tried it for long. It's incredibly slow and cumbersome with all the sub-sub-sub menus for everything.

It doesn't bother me as much as it seems to bother you, because I left the fight many years ago. I tried XFce, and used it for a good ammount of time, but eventually settled on one of the blackbox clones, and am now quite content, and getting far more real work done :-)

It's a shame

[RealBorg]

Unfortunately I have to agree with this. GNOME's file selection dialog is one of the worst things I have ever seen and I often end up typing the absolute path of a file I want to open/save.

A bit overblown

[readams]

Since I'm the developer directly quoted in both articles (I guess I had the best sound bite), I should probably offer a clarification. Stating that a feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it is merely a statement of reality.

However, to claim that this means that I personally or other GNOME devs don't care about users is an exaggeration. Users requesting a feature quite often is a way to get a developer to want to implement the feature, especially since free software developers want their projects to be good and widely used.

All we were saying in that thread is we already know what features are widely requested. Adding voting merely creates an illusion that the votes will, in the end, count for something meaningful. In reality the best the votes could provide is a biased sample of oft-requestedness, which we can already discern by comments on bugzilla bugs and duplicates. We do care about users and we do care about their concerns.

Re:A bit overblown

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you actually admit to the very problem that was brought up.

Sofware CANNOT be developed based on what a coder does or does not want to implement. That is the path to nowhere.

Software must be developed to meet the users needs, reguardless if it seems "fun" or "Exciting" to code to any particular coder.

If you have a list of things that you know need to be done but no one will do them then at least assign one "crummy" project to each coder before you will allow them their "dream" project. Coding is not all blow-jobs and beer!

The sooner you and other OSS developers learn this, the sooner your and other OSS developers products will become generally usable and therefore desireable to more than the microsom of the geek community.

- Linux, developed by babies and prima donnas!

Re:A bit overblown

[msimm]

I've said this a million times:

Look at www.kde-look.org. Theres listening, in the haphazard sort of way (thats OLD school OSS, and its fine) and there's listening in the WE REALLY WANT TO GET THIS RIGHT way.

I think Gnome has continued to push old-school. If anything, it went from a slightly standard GUI/DE very similar to KDE/Explorer/ETC and started trying to do things differently.

Of course the catch is most of us don't want to relearn how to use something as basic as a desktop.

Your (not necessarily *you*) new save dialog is a good example of this. Its user encumbering. And this seems to be a trend.

Any way, my intention isn't to be insulting so I'm sorry if you feel that I am. I'm just making a slightly frustrated observation.

It wouldn't be an issue at all if some many good applications weren't tied directly to the toolset (same I'm sure with Gnome users and KDE/QT programs). But the fact is because I like a number of "Gnome" programs I'm stuck using an interface which I literally hate.

What usability tests?

[synthespian]

[GNOME is] (...) very usability-test centric (...)

AFAIK, there's only one formally conducted usability-test , a small one at that, made a long time ago, with 12 people. And it was conducted by Sun, not by any Free Software organization.

The worst part of all this...

[readams]

They took my original quote verbatim but changed "received" from the correct spelling to an incorrect one!

Fork Off

[Anonymous Coward]

quote:-
"because I respect myself and my choices. I prefer to shed down the right money for the right commercial software (open or closed), than to use half-baked, half-implemented OSS software made by deaf developers."
Here here, bloody well said, all you get from these OSS people is insults about your C/C++ coding, your conf files, your choice of filesystem, even dare I say it your OS!
Imagine, users so stupid they could not recompile without useing someone else's makefile, such users should be shot on sight!

EXACTLY

[Anonymous Coward]

And while we're at it, let's talk button order.

Did the users suddenly start screaming for Mac-style button ordering? Fuck no. It was foisted on all GNOME users without any discussion. It was formalised in an over-glorified "HID" and everyone was told "No, THIS is the right way. Trust us."

Nevermind that UNIX GUI interfaces have a long history of supporting the CUA standard developed by IBM and the OSF. CUA pre-dates Windows--it first appeared in early versions of OS/2 for god's sake. And it's been the defacto standard of UNIX interfaces for longer than GNOME has existed.

It's bad enough when GNOME decides to force this braindead decision on users without an ounce of discussion (but lots of pontification! Oh god yes, loads of pontification. And some people wonder why lots of us couldn't stand Jef Raskin??) It's even worse when this "decision" trickles down into other projects like Firefox and Thunderbird, who have taken the GNOME attitude of "Tough, this is the way it is, fuck you."

We were JUST reaching the point where GNOME and KDE apps were able to stand side by side and work in a similar manner. No more. Once again, stupid ideology trumps a long standing convention, user familiarity, and co-operation.

Re:EXACTLY

[Anonymous Coward]

"CUA pre-dates Windows--it first appeared in early versions of OS/2 for god's sake."

I don't know if CUA pre-dates Windows, but I do know that Windows pre-dates OS/2 by several years.

Gnome co-opted by vendors?

[crmurphey]

According to the OSNews editorial:

I got the answer I expected from the Novell/Sun/Red-Hat people: "regarding market research, we care about it only when happens from our marketing department and to our customers". They don't care about the "generic" Gnome user. That's ok. Understandable. These guys have a business to run.

This seems to indicate that such influence has been co-opted by employers of the Gnome decision makers. Perhaps that's the uncomfortable truth.

Re-education Required!

[Anonymous Coward]

I applaud Eugenia for having the guts to face down the FOSS zealots (and their creepy "FUD" rejection of any valid criticism of the Open Source model) on the issue of basic client service.

I don't give a damn that open source is developed by volunteers -- they offer it to the world as a replacement for commercial software and that has to entail some kind of agreement that they will offer what the world wants. If not, why should anyone care about what they do?

FOSS is truly the last gasp of Socialism in this world and, for good or ill, destined for the same fate.

Re:Re-education Required!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're full of it. Likening FOSS to Socialism just shows how antiquated your thinking is.

Free software (free, as in "will") means we are forever released from determinist claptrap about how to meet our needs and execute our plans.

So what if it's sometimes ineffectual and cumbersone. It's FREEDOM, dude!

Re:Re-education Required!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be offended when nobody gives a damn about you.

Re:Re-education Required!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Free software (free, as in "will") means we are forever released from determinist claptrap about how to meet our needs and execute our plans."

You're going to die some day, so forever isn't literally true.

It depends upon the nature....

[Elpacoloco]

....of the open source project itself.

Is GNOME's goal to be a window manager for developers? Then it's done, and it can ignore her.

Is GNOME's goal to replace proprietary software? Then it had better listen to her, or windows is going to gain another user.

There is only one project I have seen that did not have rude developers. ReactOS's developers have always been polite and professional when I have a problem. I think this is because if React rubs me the wrong way, it is a victory for Windows.

I also had a technical problem with the HURD, and when I reached the developers, they called me "Retarded" and "a troll" and "a f***ing pest."
When I explained that No, I could not reboot into the HURD right now, because I only have one computer, and I'm using it to talk to you, they really flew off the handle.

I can understand their additude, though. HURD is for developers. If I don't use it, they don't care.

Re:It depends upon the nature....

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds more like HURD is for HURD developers, not for developers in general.

... and if only she was wrong.

[DougReed]

I stopped using GNOME a couple of years ago because after I got tired of the eye candy, I found that - even though KDE annoyed me by being too Windozeish... It actually WORKED! My KDE desktop goes months without me ever logging off... Gnome's memory leaks caused me to logoff and on every week or so.

GNOME is just a broken GUI written by geeks who want it to look cool at all costs and every release shifts the user paradigm in some strange way that some geek decided was "better"... So I have to install it, spend a couple of daze to make it work again and then spend the next week learning about the stuff they changed. I'm too busy to mess with GNOME. I even wrote applications in GNOME to find out they didn't work in the next release because someone depreciated the API becuase the new one had better support for some eye candy feature.

Now Sun is morphing it into some Java Desktop that will probably never work right... Nothing Sun ever did with GUI stuff ever worked. They still can't get the Terminfo database right after 20 years. If they can't work Curses, what hope do they have for a real GUI?

Now people are suggesting GNOME be forked... Sorry guys... I think GNOME is doomed.

I don't get it...

[ubernostrum]

I thought the software world learned a long time ago that design-by-committee blows.

Inspiration for My Own Word Processor

[Cruxus]

Reading the developor philosophy for the GNOME project has inspired me to develop a word processer likewise based solely on my own word processing needs. Since I have prefect spelling and diction, spelling and grammer correction tools will not be needed. This will give me time to create a much more useful feature: auto-insertion of the insperational quote of the day by me.

I expect to impliment this feature using a relational database management system so that more similar features can be added in later versions. True, a DBMS for some quotes will increase the memory footprint of this app considerably, but it's worth it to get these quotes!

If anyone would like to suggest other features I could add, I'll be happy to ignore your pleas if I don't think I'd use that feature myself.

What is Design? Who decides?

[nikkie]

There are really great points in this discussion, and in the articles that brought us to this discussion. Something that has been left out, however, is *who* is the user?

The article by the editor of ZDnet has intelligent things to say about design process, mainly that devs should be designing for their users, and not themselves. This in and of itself is an absolutely true statement. Where the trouble comes in is that software development does not really follow the standard model of design. It *can't*. When I design something for my users, ideally I would be as detached as possible from this user group, and then do research to find out what they want. I would observe them, interview them, take pictures, and use all sorts of techniques to build a picture of how the interaction works. Then I would build and synthesize, etc etc etc.

This model is *inherently* flawed for most software developers. It's like asking someone who spends all day in a tractor to redesign his tractor, while driving it. Yes, the tractor driver knows a heck of a lot about tractor driving. The main purpose of focusing on your user group, instead of designing for yourself, is to design truly innovative things, and not just generalize your user group to death.

So, to ask these tractor drivers (the devs) to design for other people is like asking your tractor driving to forget the fact that he's been driving a tractor for 12 years, and knows it inside and out.

From a commercial product perspective, maybe this needs to happen. Maybe we need to find a whole bunch of designers who have never used a computer and ask them to study this user group, and then design an interface that is truly innovative. But, on the other hand, maybe having software that reflects what the hardware is like is inherently better. I don't know, I play both sides of this game. Either way, people should be more tolerant and respectful of both Eugenia's and the devs' perspectives on the issue, since they are both technically right.

The way you say something matters

[cching1112]

As pointed out in eXper Zone, If GNOME claims, "In keeping with GNOME's 'users first' philosophy, GNOME makes stable releases every six months. This delivers improvements to users quickly, and allows developers and distributors to plan their GNOME-based products with confidence," then I have to say the response, "Bugzilla supports voting out of the box; we've previously discussed this and decided it wasn't in our best interests. A feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it, regardless of the number of votes it's recieved" certainly is not appropriate. How can it be both user first and say, "A feature will be implemented if and only if there is a developer who wants to implement it, regardless of the number of votes it's recieved" at the same time?

Does Gnome actually want users to use Gnome?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a very real problem. Users are feeling frustrated of the state of OSS Desktop Environments.

For years Mozilla has suffered a poor market share. Had they done any market research they would have realized that most Users just wanted a 'browser that works'. It appeared the Mozilla developers wanted 'a browser that does everything', rendering Mozilla buggy and bloated.

This continued for as long as someone 'with the ability' started to create a different browser (Firefox). Users flocked to firefox en-mass cause it did what they wanted. Now the Mozilla suite is no longer being developed.

Had some basic market research been done firefox could be years ahead in terms of market share.

The truth is that most frustrated users do not have the 'ability' to 'take the source' (as most people like to think) and develop their own Desktop Environment. Users want to use something that 'works out of the box' and does 'what they want to do' easily.

Ignoring users feedback and requests well ensure microsoft will continue to own the Desktop.

It's a different problem

[thisisauniqueid]

The real problems are:

1. Most users do not actually know what they want, despite the fact that they think they do. If you were to implement what they asked for, they would probably come back and say, "That's not what I asked for!" And you'd say, "Yes it is." And they'd say, "Well, that's not what I meant." Pick any of a number of huge, high-profile software projects that have been canceled due to budget and time overruns, feature creep, bug pandemics, etc., and you will find that one of the major problems is that the customer's requirements changed constantly, because the customer did not know what they really wanted from the beginning to the end, or because their requirements or understanding changed as they saw things implemented.
   
   See the cartoon at the top of this page
   
   
2. Users may not understand what they want because so much of what they do in using the system is subconscious, and we humans are *not* aware of our subconscious processes. Some of it is even "hardware" rather than "software", e.g. in our visual system, and we absolutely cannot reverse-engineer our hardware by introspection. Try to figure out how you read handwritten words sometime. No, really try and figure it out. Then try to write a program to do handwriting recognition the same way humans do it. I know what this entails, because I've spent a few years actually trying to understand how humans work and build such a system. We humans just don't get our own thought processes. This is why usability studies are more important than implementing whatever feature you *think* will be cool.
   
   
3. Even if the user knew exactly what they wanted, it may be completely impractical to implement, due to programming contstraints.
   
   
4. Even if the user knew exactly what they wanted, they probably don't know how to succinctly describe it to the programmer. It's a language problem and a communication problem. It's also a point-of-view problem (relativism).
   
   
5. Humans are all very, very different. Ask 100 people to give you a list of the music that they think the rest of the world should listen to. You will *not* find a consensus. But there are songs that almost everybody likes. And there are multiple radio stations if you don't like a certain genre, but you like another instead (think KDE vs. GNOME).
   

GNOME got to a point where something had to be done to take it in a specific direction. The direction it took stands to benefit the most people in the most profound way. Personally I'm glad that they moved ahead the way they did. The KDE community is currently locked somewhat in stasis, because there are too many opinions, too much entropy, and no single consensus as to how to move forward. I'm not talking about making small changes, those are happening, and KDE is implementing some great features, I'm talking about the lack of major new directions for KDE such as what is happening in GNOME. That will change, a consensus will arise, and KDE will move forward in a major new direction at some point in the future.

Until then, try taking GNOME 1.0-GNOME 1.2 and extrapolate the situation that existed then to produce a hypothetical view of the way things would be now if a few core GNOME hackers hadn't done something. It would be a real mess of mismatching pieces. It might be a hacker-boy-cool mess, but it would be a mess. GNOME-2.10 is clean, lean, and most importantly consistent, and a better fit for how our subconscious processes understand information.

Besides, if they're the ones writing the code, I say they can do whatever they want with it.

gnome problems

[cg0def]

if you believe that the gnome project is really respecting it's users you must be either very dumb or just not very well informed. I don't know of a version since 1.4 that hasn't broken some functionality. I hate to say it but KDE has a lot better management. For being such a large project Gnome seems to be run by a bunch of amature college kids and this never help. Also seems like gnome is lacking not only developers put testers as well.
Oh yeah and I have also never heard of developers moving from KDE to Gnome but there are quite a few major ones that moved from Gnome to KDE. Plus it really doesn't help Gnome that they use C with a new objects class when they could have just used C++ with build in objects and error checking. But then again I like C++ better than C.

Re:gnome problems

[Anonymous Coward]

If you believe all that you must be either very dumb or just not very well informed.

making users count

[zogger]

good idea. There's a lot more users than devs, this is a true data point. People can buy a per seat license, limited to one per person (how? not sure..somehow). That gets one vote. Stuff gets voted on, features, bugs, enhancements, directions, whatever.. No scams like releasing 10 times a year to charge more either, make it once a year *major release*, tops, and initial cost be much cheaper than windows or mac osx, say 20 clams or something, not 79.95$ or worse than that. Then as a real user, you really get an input, whether you are a dev contributing patches or not. If you are just a casual user with the free version, sure, maybe there's a que, but not enough interest to help fund, then tough luck, no vote. Something like that might work.

A better Gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

The current impression (IMHO) of the Gnome community is a Developer-driven desktop. There is currently no prominent area on the website 'inviting' users feedback and feature requests. There are no polls for users to vote on the most important features of Gnome, or what users actually want. If something like this existed Im sure we wouldnt have 'Spatial Nautilus' turned on by default, and a lot of unhappy users.

Users really would like to help Gnome, but not many users like myself have the time to the write documentation or develop for Gnome.

The developers are doing a great job with Gnome development however the OSS model does lean towards a developer-driven model, that is understandable as their is no strong motive to use their own free time to develop what other users want.

A win-win situation would be to allow "Friends of Gnome" to be able to vote on what features should be developed and included in Gnome. The existance an 'open' voting/feature request system would better support Gnome's 'users first' philosophy.

This will actually give developers a motive for developing user requested features and make everybody happy.

If I had the impression that users was influencing the direction of Gnome I would happily contribute to the Gnome Foundation, and overall feel better about continuing to use the Gnome desktop.

Yeah, um... You may want to stop using IE.

[Rahga]

As far as I know, those tags don't show up with Mozilla Firefox on windows, only with Internet Explorer.

Re:Yeah, um... You may want to stop using IE.

[Ewan]

They show up for me, firefox on windows. i think you can disable javascript to stop them

Re:Yeah, um... You may want to stop using IE.

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you don't know very much. They show up in Mozilla and Firefox if you have Javascript enabled.

A Few Good Developers

[bXTr]

GNOME Developer: You want attention?

GNOME User: I think I'm entitled.

GNOME Developer: You want attention?

GNOME User: I want GNOME to be more user-friendly!

GNOME Developer: You can't handle user-friendliness! Son, we live in a world that has computers, and those computers have to be programmed by people with compilers. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Website Editor? I have more responsibility here than you could possibly fathom. You weep for user-friendliness, and you curse the GNOME Developers. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That GNOME's usability, while hard, probably works well enough for most people. And that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, creates useful software. You don't want the truth. because deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me behind that keyboard, you need me behind that keyboard. We use words like "open source", "free software", "community". We use these words as the backbone to a life spent scratching a personal itch. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very software I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I'd prefer you said thank you, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a copy of Linux, and start coding. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to!

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

You hit it right on the head my friend.

Ready for the desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

OSS zealots and evangelists keep bleating on about how OSS (e.g. Linux, Gnome, KDE, OOo, etc) is ready for the desktop. Some of us even believe their words and make the switch. Often to end up with software that is not up to grade. When complaining or asking for a new feature, they often get told where to go. Nice! Where are the zealots and evangelists then?

The freedom to complain?

[grolschie]

If OSS is really about freedom and not about price, then complaining about Gnome is indeed as legit as complaining about software you actually paid licensing fees for.

Article Mirror

[Heretik]

Just in case you can't get at the page, here's a quick summary:

"Volunteer Gnome developers aren't my unpaid slaves! Waah, waah, waah! I want this and I want that and I want it done immediately without any thought about whether it's actually a good idea whatsoever! Waah, waah, waah! Open source is crap because all these people don't do whatever I say, for free, always, without question! Waah, waah, waah! How dare they work on things they want to, and find interesting?!? Waaaaahhh!"

Pathetic.

DIY or STFU Mentality

[SoupIsGood Food]

I was flamed to hell and gone on the OpenBSD mailing lists a few years back for saying the same things she did. I realized that OpenBSD was best used as a server OS rather than a general purpose workstation OS, and indicated there were areas that needed a lot of work to bring it into line with what the typical sys-admin or web developer needed. (My biggest gripe, then as now, is the lack of a decent SMP implementation across all the platforms they claim to support.)

I was branded a troll, and consigned to the bit-bucket of everyone who mattered on the lists. They told me, simply, "DIY or STFU."

I can really see their point - they don't do this for money, they do this because it's fun and intellectually challenging. They weren't interested in SMP applications as much as they were interested in other areas of OS development and "freeing" essential parts of the infrastructure from onerous licensing. (OpenSSH and pf being the most famous examples.)

On the other hand, Theo is famous for clobbering his developers into doing the Right Thing for the project, even if it's just buckling down and doing uninteresting, no-fun grunt work, like writing clear, concise and complete man pages or refactoring the code endlessly for potential bugs as part of his fabled "code auditing."

Listening to the end users, even if they aren't coders themselves, is an "Eat Your Vegetables" part of being a grown up. As such, it's violently resisted by hackers who'd rather you just take the code and fork it if you have a problem, and sneer at you if you don't have the technical chops to pull it off. I can appreciate that... they did a lot of hard work for something they love. They don't need to hear some ingrate who can't sling code telling them their work isn't good enough.

On the other hand, OpenBSD is only now bothering to get their SMP implementation to work when we're less than a year away from all processors becomming multi-core, and multi-processor systems as common as rain. Are they really better off for ignoring the lamer, non-coding end users? How much corporate sponsorship have they given up because they had no interest in supporting features corporations use?

As a counter-example, Postgres has always been very responsive to their userbase. It's an insanely useful program few people ever take issue with, and is deployed in big business as well as home hobbyist applications.

SoupIsGood Food

Re:DIY or STFU Mentality

[petrus4]

>I was branded a troll, and consigned to the
>bit-bucket of everyone who mattered on the
>lists. They told me, simply, "DIY or STFU."

Yep...that's why although I might worship them from a distance, I won't go within 20 miles of any of the BSD developers...ESPECIALLY Open, actually...what with what I've read about how prickly Theo is. That is the classic autistic UNIX mentality, however. Chronic elitism, and virtually a complete inability to relate to other human beings. They see themselves as the last bastion of human intelligence...the only problem is that on this last point, I tend to think that in believing that about themselves, the BSD people in particular are actually right. ;-)

If OTOH the Gnome team genuinely are the group of general assholes that I seem to keep hearing they are, it's no great loss. ;-) There are plenty of other window managers and desktop environments about, and I'm sure at least some of them have developers who have far more people skills and are more willing to listen to the requests of their users. My advice wouldn't be DIY, it'd be vote with your feet...if the Gnome peeps won't give you what you need, find another wm that has devs who will. The Gnome crew don't seem to care about becoming irrelevant...so let them. ;) Gnome as a single project has probably always really been a solution in search of a problem anywayz...the world certainly won't stop turning if it dies.

"A feature will be implemented if and only if...

[Per Abrahamsen]

... there is a developer who wants to implement it."

A truism if I ever heard one. Ill want to implement a feature if one (or more) of the following are true:

1. Someone is paying me to implement the feature.
2. I need the feature myself.
3. The feature is "fun" to implement.

I'm not Richard M. fucking Stallman, I have not dedicated my life for the cause of free software. I do respect those who have, but such idealists are far to rare to carry the free software movement by themselves. The bulk of the work has to be done by the rest of us, who write free software for fun and profit.

And honestly, whining users who think free software is about other people cathering to their every need for free, are only taking away the fun part. If you want the right to be heard, you have to pay. This is as true for free software as it is for proprietary software.

The code is free, the developers time isn't.

Stop being part of the problem.

Should have been more specific.

[Lendrick]

I'm running X.Org as opposed to XFree86 (which is what I was referring to as obsolete, not the X protocol in general. My bad.)

Re:Should have been more specific.

[Anonymous Coward]

Without the license change it could look quite different.

... as she is a total moron

[Per Abrahamsen]

The *commercial* players (Red Hat, Sun, Novell), whom I suspect do the bulk of the Gnome work, are according to the article *not* ignoring their users. Euginia is explicitly complaining that the *hobbyist* are ignoring user requests, and focusing on their own needs.

The Gnome Foundation don't have the ressources to finance any significant development themselves. All they can do is to choose which of development others (commercial players and hobbyists) have done should be included. Being user oriented means they choose those developments they believe that benefit the users most.

And no, the ability to focus on the need of specific user group (in this case, yourself), and ignore the requests of other users, does not make you a worse engineer in a professional setting. Quite the contrary, that ability is always needed in any software projects, if you try to be everything to all people, you will fail.

GIMP - tens of thousands of man-hours wasted

[alizard]

on a product that a handful of graphics artists love, and everyone else who's tried the product runs screaming away in horror.

Perhaps this has something to do with an FOSS development team that really doesn't care what the users think or what users who would like to be able to use this stuff to make a living with need.

If an application doesn't do what the allegedly intended userbase needs it to do, putting a million hours into it is a circle jerk for the development team, not a useful contribution to Open Source.

Doesn't matter how many person-hours go into a project if the end result isn't useful to the developers and a handful of other people. If the GIMP development team find it it adequately supports their graphics needs, cool. Don't waste the time of the user community telling me how k3w1 and l337 it is... until the software will back up those words.

Certainly, I'd like to see GIMP turn into a usable professional-grade product on a par with Photoshop. I'd also like to see hell freeze over, I've never seen that happen, either. Which will happen first?

Since I've got work to do (for instance, editing screen shots for Yet Another Linux How-To article in progress), I've got an X-Window with Win4Lin/W98SE in it up all the time and I run Windows graphics program in it when I need serious vector or raster graphics.

I'm pinning my hopes on Linux alternatives to GIMP I've heard about in their early stages and that someday, Inkscape will be ready to replace my copy of Corel Draw.

As for "surly leech"... I've got an article published which will actually give a novice user the ability to make Linux backups using either a mirror drive or DVD (and my piece tells people how to make a backup individual files/directories can be recovered from)... and I'm about to have a similar piece published on how to actually get the Linux multimedia apps a typical user needs running at the same time.

IOW, I've actually written useful Linux documentation that doesn't take being a propeller-head to use. There isn't anything wrong with man files (info is an abomination) for the experienced Linux user, but to seize turf from MS, documentation adequate for the person who just bought a box with Linux preinstalled because he's sick of Windows malware needs to be provided.

Yes, I got paid. That's because my writing is worth paying for. There are a number of people paid by all the major commercial players in the Linux area, and they don't apologize for getting paid, either.

What have you done for Open Source lately? Anything? Or are you just another fanboy?

Cut'n'Paste

[chefren]

I really, really think that kick-ass cut and paste (think on the lines of m$ offices internal clipboard) across the entire gnome platform would be *the* killer feature for any release.

Isnt knowing what users want important.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have thought some formal invitation of 'feature requests', what features are important to gnome, and what features actually want would be valuable information.

Gnome may not have the resources to implement every feature but having some 'open' formal process to get this information will provide a good knowledgebase where to invest developers time, and provide an avenue for users to provide feedback.

Some information may actually save developers time, as users may let developers know early not to pursue unpopular features like 'spatial nautilis' etc.

Let me tell you something

[Anonymous Coward]

Customers are fucking idiots.

Now, sometimes there are clueful customers, which is very good, since then things tend to work out. But if you get clueless customers wanting a load of features in their own clueless way, what you end up with is total chaos and crap nobody will want to use (not even them since they are non-technical people who just care about getting the thing done in whichever way possible).

For OSS: you can suggest, but you can't dictate! And it's good that way.

article text abbreviated (considerably)

[that _evil _gleek]

Corporate involvment in OSS is a good thing, until it's not.
Hobbiest developers only implement what they're interested in.
-------------------
Gee, I guess that's why it's a hobby , and not work.

The article is mostly a big gripe, and I think to some degree those issues were always be with OSS,
but if they get too bad, you can always fork it. He says he still supports OSS, so that's why I'm calling a 'gripe', and not a problem, problems have solutions... If it was really a problem, I'd suggest a new license model, maybe
something like a corporation crossed with a a co-op. You buy a share, and its a license to use the software, modify the software (for your own), basically everything you can do with OSS, but fork it. And vote like stockholders, the more shares, the more $$ you put it, the more your vote counts. Or, something, any way if you /are/ a corporation or something like it, then you don't need other corps as much... But, I don't think its really a problem.

What do OSS developers owe *you*?

[Money for Nothin']

Expert-Zone posted another one on how OSS must learn to take responsibility on its great success."

Why? What do OSS developers owe you? They already work for free -- you think they are *responsible* for listening to you?

No.

They will listen to you if they want to. You are not paying them. You are not their boss. You have no rights to their software except those which they, as the producers, have granted you.

You want responsibility? Start with yourself by not trying to take a mile when given an inch.

Developers' replies

[BenjyD]

planet.gnome.org has a load of GNOME developers responding to the two articles in a far more logical and intelligent way than the articles deserve.

Somebody like Eugenia who runs such a badly-implemented news+comment site really shouldn't complain about GNOME not implementing features the users want.

I have a constructive proposal

[seguso]

In brief

My idea is to extend Bugzilla to allow users to donate money directed towards a precise feature (or bug).

To see how this is related with Eugenia's article, please read on.

The problem

In the article, Eugenia correctly points out that OSS projects tend to ignore the needs of ordinary users: currently the OSS model tends to favour the needs of corporate customers (because corporations such as IBM or Novell put the money for those features), and those of power users (because they program the features they need by themselves). But the needs of ordinary home users are not respected as much. They often tend to be ignored.

So Eugenia is right here. But, IMHO, her error is to assume that this lack of respect for the need of ordinary users is the developers' fault. Instead, I think it is the users fault; I think users are still not as responsible and self-aware to get together and directly finance the features they want.

Consumers are not yet a responsible community and they have no awareness of themeselves as a power. (I believe this is partly why the economy is dominated by corporations.)

The solution

The idea is that

1. You donate for each feature separately. Donations are per-feature (or per-bug).
2. Everyone can donate freely (or not donate at all).
3. When, and if, the overall donation for a given feature reaches a certain threshold, that feature is guaranteed to be implemented within a given time (the time is stated in advance, before donations begin).
4. (optional) as an incentive to donating, you could give the guarantee that, if the threshold is not reached within X days, the money will be given back to the donator, or at least it will be reusable to sponsor another feature.

I am sure many of us have a small amount money, but no time to contribute code. Some of us love OSS so much that we would happily donate some, *provided* we are guaranteed the feature to be implemented if the threshold is reached.

Example

Here is the process I am proposing:

1. In bugzilla, I file a wish for a feature;
2. Some developer (Jack) decides to take care of the task, and says:

   I can implement this feature in 3 months for 5000$. I declare donations open. Donations close in 20 days, on September 6 2005.

3. People begin donating freely.
4. After 20 days, on September 6 2005: (a) if the 5000$ threshold was reached, Jack begins working, and he *must* deliver within 3 months. (b) if the 5000$ were not reached, the money is refunded to the donators (or at least it because reusable for other tasks).

Notice there are two times involved here:

1. six months. This is the maximum time needed to implement the feature.
2. september 6 2005. We can call this the "restitution date".

Both should be decided by the developer, I believe.

Many more things should be discussed:

• Once the threshold is reached, how do we decide which programmer is to take care of the task?
• What does "guarantee"mean? This is a difficult matter. Above I talked about "guarantees" as an incentive to donations. Suppose the threashold is reached for a given feature: exactly, to what extent are you guaranteed the feature will be implemented? I mean: what if the developer fails to implement the feature in the given time? After all, 100% guarantees do not exist in the real world; that's why collaboration contracts exists, stating what happens when one of the parts fails to provide its service.

  I would like someone to expand this topic. Some ideas: if it is not possible to guarantee the feature is implemented, at least we can guarantee it will be worked on. We could also set up some rating system, where developers are rated according to how well they behaved in the past.

  As an extreme measure, we could provide legal contracts between donators and implementors! I would not underestimate this possibility.

My best wishes to you all.

Re:I have a constructive proposal

[The MESMERIC]

+++ mod parent interesting !

i wish if i could but i can't i just meta-mod :)

and here is a fiver ..
please add optional "stay on top" button
that should not be default
but added from from "Desktop Preferences" somewhere.
"Windows Decorations" Maybe?

and here is a tenner ..
(in loose change sorry!)
please add a menu editor
or if that is just too much trouble
then allow us to edit folders directly
(not just items) by right clicking

* Add new category
* Delete category

excellent
and now I am skint :/

Re:I have a constructive proposal

[jalefkowit]

You can do this right now using DropCash. Here's an example of one developer using it to see if there's anyone willing to pay for the development of a new feature to his popular Movable Type plugin. There's no reason why you couldn't set up a DropCash box for any feature request and then just post the link in Bugzilla...

Need Gnome Help

[The MESMERIC]

This is not a troll.
But a plea for help.

My sister has Gnome now as her default desktop.
I am tidying up the menu deleting entries on her personal account.
While leaving the system menu and my account intact.

I didn't want to RTFM simply because if I find anything unintuitive,
she being a complete n00b will have an ever harder time

So I've deleted every single entry in
Desktop Preferences > Accessibility (using right click very intuitive)
But the folder Accessiblity I can't delete directly (tried right click again and nada)

How can I go about this?
I see there is no Menu-Editor either.
But people say Gnome is about easy and useabilty
first and foremost.

So let this be one example.
I seriously don't want to emerge KDE,
but if I can't do this simple thing - I might feel tempted.

Re:Need Gnome Help

[The MESMERIC]

damn i had to RTFM .. not my intention

OK this is what you do

open nautilus
type in applications:///
browse to the category in question
rename it with a "." in front
that should make it disappear from the menu.

who said life was difficult:/// ?

I looove gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing wrong with gnome. Even the spatial Nautilus doesn't bother me since I can turn it off. I love it. It looks good and everything just works. I'm quite a newbie so I really haven't tried out anything else than KDE and Gnome, but from these, Gnome is my choice. And no I don't loathe KDE, I just prefer Gnome. Here's my desktop. I like it the way it is. My DeskTop

Aren't you all tired of Eugenia's Histrionics?

[LibrePensador]

To hell with my good karma.

I am glad that somebody told Eugenia to fuck off. It's about damn time.

Her pit hole in the web has done more damage to free and open source software than any other site and all she does is whine with a profound sense of entitlement.

She feels compeled to tell Gnome developers what to do, all the while posting from MS Outlook and telling the world that they should be using XP.

Where are the patches or the documentation she contributed?

Eugenia, go away, you will not be missed.

Re:Aren't you all tired of Eugenia's Histrionics?

[BenjyD]

I deleted my bookmark to osnews a while back after a previous one of these terrible articles, but ended up reinstating it after a few links from slashdot stories convinced me things had changed.

Never again: my osnews bookmark is gone for good. I guess I should have realised how bad a site it was when I sent a quick, badly written, email about an article to her and it was used verbatim as a story.

Re:Aren't you all tired of Eugenia's Histrionics?

[LibrePensador]

Ouch, that would hurt!

Osnews has outgrown its usefulness and for all its faults I tend to think that Slashdot's moderation system tends to keep things within rational bounds. Besides that, slashdot hardly ever portrays itself as little more than a blog, whereas Eugenia believes that her tandrums amount to journalism.

Pointing to her that she does not have a sound editorial policy or any other issues will only get you "moderated".

Anyway, it's late, I guess I also moved on from osnews a long time ago and I am just saddened because I see lots of energetic people who could otherwise be learning to code or writing documentation or having plain fun getting caught up in useless flamewars with our beloved Eugenia.

what?

[Anonymous Coward]

what is this gnome you speak of?

must???

[lkcl]

Expert-Zone posted another one on how OSS must learn to take responsibility on its great success."

where is the "must" in not being _paid_ to work on OSS?

sending mockups for ideas.

[pfharlock]

The author of this article suggests at one point that the gnome devs asking users who wish to submit ideas create a quick mockup is somehow unreasonable. I've found mockups to be instrumental in taking a user's idea, (which might be very good), and conveying it to a developer in a way that's meaningful. You couldn't achieve the same result in 100 pages of text. If a user isn't smart enough to pull out GIMP and create such a mockup, they have no business making suggestions to the gnome devs anyway, they obviously don't know enough about computers to have meaningful input. I've had a longstanding problem with the direction gnome has gone in, (which is why I've begun to use XFCE as an alternative), and she did a nice job mentioning some of the problems. No menu editing, the eradication of preferences that I thought were good to have like workspace switching by dragging the mouse to the edge of the screen. I personally like spatial nautilus, but I understand why many wouldn't. Certain difficiancies with gnome-terminal, like the fact that scrolling the window when maximized caused the text to get garbled for a couple of years before it was fixed. Over time, I have started to understand why some of the features were dropped. Why wouldn't the old nautilus be supported as a standard option, because the devs are working exclusively on spatial nautilus. The old file manager isn't seeing any development time, so why expose it to unsuspecting users when it's not in active development anymore. (it's the same reason that the mozilla devs are discontinuing support of mozilla in favor of firefox). My much beloved workspace switching is in truth confusing for most users, and while I still wish I had the option, GNOME has long made it clear that they favor catering to the mass of drueling cretons who have trouble figuring out the difference between a single click and a double click over power users. This is also the reason they don't include a menu editor. They are counting on the program developers to include menu entries with their programs that make sense so that the user doesn't have to think about it, indeed doesn't have the means to screw something up. While I understand their desire to shield the user, that's not the reason I started using linux, and it's this shift in paradigm that has caused me to use alternate environments like xfce. That is the beauty of OSS, there's always choice.

news at 11...

[Lazy Jones]

Open Source project ignores common usability practices and its users' opinions. Wow, never seen that before :)

Also entirely surprisingly, the discussion revolves around the usual common points of view: "DIY or STFU", "we do as we like until we get paid" and "Gnome sucks".

*yawn* ...

Re:news at 11...

[MikeBabcock]

I've been using Gnome for a long time now, and still run something resembling Gnome on Enlightenment. I was part of the original mailing list for user interface guidelines and realized early on that the programmers in the project were not the least bit interested in what non-programmers thought of UI.

I happen to be a programmer; I write both Linux and Windows software, primarily POS software and back-end middleware daemons. I know a thing or two about users and consistent interfaces.

Time and time again however, unless I wanted to put 30 hours of my own time into fixing something that someone else wrote, nobody cared what I or anyone else thought. The worst of it was that nobody bothered getting opinions or working out details on how the software they were writing should work *before* just writing it.

Hack-fest software is great fun, but if you want good software, please put some thought into it, and value the opinions of those with more experience than yourself.

Gimp works. Grip does not.

KDE

[obzidian]

Hmm. I've been using various RedHat flavours for years (FC3 now). From early on I prefered KDE to Gnome anyway. I found KDE more straightforward to use and felt it had a better GUI.

Gnome has COMMERCIAL implementations

[the_skywise]

But it's not a commercial project. As others have pointed out, commercial entities develop their own implementations as needed for their customers (and the features have SOMETIMES been reintegrated back into the main code tree) or have dropped Gnome altogether when their needs couldn't be met.

So essentially.. the COMMERCIAL developers are forking Gnome or dropping it.

Re:"A feature will be implemented if and only if..

[Anonymous Coward]

So RMS has dedicated his life to the cause of free software, but apparently it's not about catering to other people's needs so I guess it's not something we should thank him for. Nobody has to thank me for my hobbies either.

Talk about feeding the trolls...

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything is a volunteer effort

What a bunch of crap. How does unsightful garbage like this keep getting modded up? I suppose, with statements like that, you think that up is down and black is white.

For crying out loud moderators, please do your homework before modding idiots and the uninsightful drivel that they post up. Sheesh!

Git-r-done!

[Anonymous Coward]

My conception of something decent would take all the good parts from everywhere and put them in one place. It does not need to be perfect.

So if we could take the good parts of Windows, combined with the good from OS X, with the good from GNOME, KDE, etc., and put them into a new desktop evironment then we might have something decent to work off of and improve.

What are you waiting for?

That's a similar conclusion that I came to.

[eugene ts wong]

That being said, I dropped Gnome years ago because I felt it was focused more on programmers doing what they wanted and giving other programmers cool programming stuff, and KDE was much more focused on an easy to use experience.

Around the 3.1.4 days of KDE, I began to read the documentation of both environments to get an idea of what I should use. Without a doubt, I can honestly say that I actually enjoyed reading about KDE and how to use it. I was being sold on it, and I appreciated being sold on it. I read as much as I could find on the KDE web site about the base install.

After that, I went to the GNOME web site, and honestly, the docs put me to sleep. They were harder to read than man pages. There was no direction. The documentation gave information that wasn't already obvious. For example, it would say something similar to this, "To open a file, click on the file menu, then select save. To save a file, click on the file menu, then select save.". Don't get me wrong. This information is important, but I don't think that that is the information that people are looking for when they read documentation. I think that GNOME gave a poor explanation of what each software package does, while KDE tells you what it is for and how to use it. GNOME gave a poor quality cheat sheet, while KDE gave a tutorial.

I guess GNOME is more task oriented, while KDE seems more goal oriented. GNOME says, "Hey! Let's build a file menu. After we're done, we can design some kind of app to use it, like a drawing program or something.", while KDE says, "Hey! Let's build a drawing program or something, and we can make it more user friendly by building something like a menu to deal with saving and opening files.".

I honestly couldn't force myself to read through the entire GNOME documentation. I just went with KDE and never regretted it.

As for GUIs, you're right about GUIs being better for many people. That's because it teaches you as you use it. Where as, command lines don't necessarily do that. The typical console apps require "-h" or something to show its choices, and even then it only gives enough information for those who are already familiar with the concept. I teach ESL and high school math to adults, so I believe that I have an idea of what it means to be user friendly for learning styles. I really appreciate you mentioning that you taught as well.

gnome file manager

[CAIMLAS]

This has been an "issue" for me. I really, really hate the GNOME (or GTK+, I don't know how they interface) file dialog interface. It feels like its a setback to me: it takes longer to navigate than an old TK interface, as it essentially requires the mouse, doesn't have tab completion, and various other irritating lack of proper features.

Does anyone have a "defense" for it? Is there really a large majority of people that prefer that kind of interface to what, say, KDE uses (which I prefer)?

Trends...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we need to graph Eugenia's drivel alongside her menstrual cycle

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[sbszine]

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