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Release Team Proposes Gnome 3.0 Plans
benuski writes "Today at GUADEC, the Gnome User and Developer European Conference, the gtk+ team announced their plans for gtk+ 3.0; immediately after, the Gnome release team announced their plans for Gnome 2.30 to be changed into Gnome 3.0. This would mean a release date a year and a half to a year in the future. Details are short at the moment, but the Gnome team seems to be following in KDE's footsteps, but hopefully will avoid the problems that plagued KDE 4.0's release."
I see your $0.02 and raise you a nickel.
My problem with KDE 4 is that I can't drag a box over several desktop to select multiple desktop icons. That drives me nuts!
My problem with Gnome is the fact that I can't adjust the screen saver properties without some ugly hack.
I know, these are minor issues, but annoying nonetheless. And your post was probably the nickel's worth anyway.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Community software should mean that people can easily post bug reports and get issues like these addressed.
Open a bug for each issue and hopefully they will be addressed.
I think it is beneficial to the entire community when people report these things.
The problem is that these don't appear to be bugs, but design choices. I believe that the gnome developers intentionally removed the option to configure each of the different screen savers and that the KDE dev's set up their horrid desktop icon system by design.
What's to file?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I think he's implying that Gnome has no features.
Which, while not entirely true, is not entirely unfair.
GNOME HCI guidelines are one of the best I know of. Following the HCI leads to surprisingly good physical and mental health. 1) Navigating the GNOME dialog box with just the keyboard provides a rejuvenating and rigorous finger and mental exercise at the same time. 2) The font choices make pupil dilation effortless 3) The occlusion of "OK/Cancel" in elongated dialog boxes make accepting/rejecting dialog boxes into a fun hideAndSeek activity.
What I would really like to see from the GNOME team is a pledge to keep the framework free of unencumbered technology. Specifically, this means we need them to promise that both the framework itself, and its core applications, will not be built with .NET (Mono).
Miguel de Icaza may enjoy appeasing Microsoft, but most of the Free World does not.
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I hear this kind of complaint all the time from linux peeps. They want two very different, conflicting things to happen at once. First of all, they want linux to evolve while maintaining all the flexibility that it is known for, while also wanting so desperately for each year to be the "year of the Linux desktop." This is an either/or situation. Gnome and KDE are both aiming to be user-friendly desktops, and therefore shouldn't be criticized because they don't meet the productivity needs of a sysadmin. Like you said, vim, mutt, and wmaker are still around and kickin'.
Similes are like metaphors
Also a recent comment of his was that non-coders on the whole shouldn't be allowed to comment on design issues.
Well this is not going to make it feel any better but those who do not have experience coding often do not understand why their proposed design change does not or cannot work. Not always, but if you're good enough to design it you're typically good enough to code it. Code is just transferring a design into a language syntax. Designing it in the first place to work correctly (or not... ;) is hard.
He also repeatedly said that if you don't read the code, you can't understand the UI. That itself is a problem.
Again, this is probably actually true. Of course you can *see* the UI and point out what sucks about it but sometimes a "trivial" UI change involves a large code change. This is easier to see if you understand how the UI is actually formed from the code in question (i.e. Containments, Applets, Activities, etc. in Plasma-land).
Frankly, end users should be able to pick things up and learn them intuitively. Suggesting that if you don't read the source code, you can't understand the project means there is a serious usability issue.
Sure, but there's also the type of user (and I don't know if this is true in the case you're talking about but bear with me) that does something to the effect of:
User: Hey I noticed this is going on and it sucks, fix it!
Dev: One of:
User: Why don't you just do something like integrate the frobnitz?
Dev: Because it doesn't work like that.
User: No seriously, just integrate here and you're done.
Dev: No you don't get it. The code does not work like that. It cannot work because of reason foo
Now most bug reports we get are good reports and if the dev is actually here to work on it even get resolved to everyone's satisfaction. But we do get reports like these and when it turns into a pissing match between the user and the developer politeness is usually the first thing to go out the window. I've seen Aaron be ganged up on by multiple users in this fashion and it's really disheartening to see as a developer.
Hey, sometimes the developer is even wrong and it can be implemented somehow but that typically happens with a patch (oh, maybe it does work...), which you're not going to get from the same developers by pissing in his Cheerios and acting like a jerk. And in the end (at least in KDE) those who actually do the work get to decide so if Aaron is holding off on changing something because no one has presented a satisfactory technical solution (i.e. no "evil hacks" for bug fixes) then that's how it'll be.