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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."
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!!!
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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
I thought it was supposed to be PEOPLE that thought GNOMES didn't exist, not the other way around... ;)
"Nature bats last..."
I love it when people gripe about free software.
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.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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
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.
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
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.
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"
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
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.
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
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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*.
"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.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
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.
www.joshferguson.org
- 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
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?
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.