Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
--Excyl
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.
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.
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.
> (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)
Democrat delenda est
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*.
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.
May the Maths Be with you!
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.
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:
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.
- didn't post the judging criteria
- didn't use any judges other than those that run the footnotes site
- didn't listen to the feedback they received regarding the winning choice
- 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.nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
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.
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?