GNOME: Possible Recovery Strategies

An anonymous reader tips an article from Datamation about several suggestions for the GNOME project to answer user complaints and boost developer morale. From the article: "... with very few changes, GNOME 3 could be much more acceptable to most users. A moveable panel, panel applets, desktop launchers, user control of virtual desktops, menu alternatives that would remove the need for the overview -- all of these could be added easily as options. Together, they would reduce at least ninety percent of the complaints against GNOME 3. ... If GNOME is having trouble as a desktop environment, one obvious solution is to find new niches. Lopez and Sanchez suggested following KDE's lead and producing a tablet, while Lionel Dricot recently suggested a suite of cloud-based services. ... The one strategy that GNOME has never tried is asking users what they want. Instead, the project has preferred to rely on usability theory, treating it as an exact science instead of a collection of competing ideas supported by usually inconclusive studies that could be mustered to support almost any design. In GNOME 3, testing with actual users did not occur until near the end of the development cycle, when the chances of any major changes were remote."

Comments

Not just Gnome

[Meshach]

The one strategy that GNOME has never tried is asking users what

Almost all software has that problem.

Re:Not just Gnome

[smpoole7]

> Almost all software has that problem.

This. Especially among open source projects. I deeply appreciate their efforts, but when you go into their forums with a suggestion, or to ask why they are doing something a certain way (or more often nowadays, why they stopped doing something that everyone liked), you get scolded. Or talked down to. "Trust us, little man, we're the experts and we know what we're doing."

This article is about Gnome, but I'm still sore from the way the KDE developers handled their transition to version 4. Even the politest request was greeted with outright hostility. Gnome is by no means the only offender, nor is the offense limited to desktop environments. But it's a real problem.

I much prefer open source to proprietary software, but there's a price for the "free" stuff. I guess this is just part of it. A commercial software product that treated its "customers" the way that some FOSS projects do would be out of business in a matter of weeks.

Just my opinion and worth exactly what you paid for it. :)

Re:Not just Gnome

[MikeBabcock]

No offense, but I hope I never have to use your software.

User interfaces are all about art. A right way doesn't necessarily exist. Is right clicking better than a button? Are four buttons too many, or is seven? How many view types should be on one screen?

These vary from system to system, function to function, and a piece of software may work perfectly but suck because the user can't use it efficiently or simply hates using the software.

Lots of picky examples exist from the mundane like when I mouse over the chat window in Facebook, I expect the chat window to scroll, not the main window, when I roll the mouse wheel -- to the customer I have who want Enter to go to the next field in a form not tab because that's how it would work on a spreadsheet or a calculator.

Form shouldn't override function -- but form is very important, and almost entirely art.

Re:Not just Gnome

[spauldo]

Microsoft's done it precisely twice. Ribbon, Metro.

Add the Windows 95 / NT 4.0 UI to the list as well. I know a lot of people here diss Windows 3.x, but at the time a lot of users hated 95 and wanted to go back.

(I was one of them, not because of the UI, but because 95 was a buggy piece of shit)

Oh, and Bob would have counted if they could have gotten the computer companies on their side. A few actually included it as the default interface.

While it's a lot more minor, I personally also include the blue candy look that XP defaulted to. I hated the default XP theme and always changed it to the classic theme on any machine I had to work on. Fortunately, by the time XP was widespread, I no longer worked with Windows :)

Meanwhile, open source?

The fuck is wrong with you people?

Lack of strong leadership, generally, although you also have to account for trends in UI design that evolve over time. Today, most people run GNOME or KDE. Back in the day, it wasn't like that at all - commercial users used CDE (unavailable for free software) or OpenLook (which never gained much traction on free software for some reason). The free UNIXes had a bunch of different window managers along with a bunch of different toolkits. Most of us thought OpenSTEP would take us away from Athena and Tk, but that never really happened. Window managers explored a bunch of different ideas, and Enlightenment was going to make the world a better place if only anyone could afford a machine that could run it.

KDE and GNOME came along and unified a bunch of stuff, but in doing so you lose choice and control over your desktop. GNOME especially has tried to remove options and configurability to try to appeal to some hypothetical end user who couldn't be trusted with sharp objects and tended to try to eat rocks. GNOME 3 is a logical extension of this philosophy.

Here's the kicker: you don't have to play. You can install your distro's GNOME and deal with it, or you can find something you like that's stable and stick with it. I use a highly customized FVWM setup that hasn't changed significantly since about 1998.

What Gnome 3 Needs

[rcjhawk]

Is a big button on the panel that says "Make it Work Like Gnome 2" Or FVWM, I'm not picky.

Re:Extensions

[redmid17]

Great point. Everyone prefers a piece of shit out of box that you have to shine and polish to make look nice.

They won't listen anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME devs are not going to aknowledge their mistake. No, for them, it's everyone else who are mistaked about the way they should handle their work. And, of course, it's GNOME devs who know it best. Their design is marvelous, all that is left is for user to bend himself to it.

That's why GNOME 3 is stripped of so much functionality, deemed "unneeded" by devs on the basis of them not needing it. And they continue upon this path: http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2012/08/01/cross-cut/

KDE has it, too, but to a lesser degree and most of the time they let user configure his environment.

Re:Best strategy

[darkfeline]

Alternative: make a cute anime girl mascot.

Re:Revert back to what worked

[couchslug]

"Don't screw up the perfectly fine UI because you have nothing else to do. (GNOME 3)"

Al UI should constantly change because change is progress.

That's why the letters of the alphabet are revised every few years.

Car analogy

[MichaelSmith]

So out of the box every control is a switch under the instrument panel but you can install your own extensions with steering wheels, pedals, etc if you want.

Any recovery strategy starts with "We're sorry."

[erroneus]

The first thing that would get everyone's attention is an apology and/or acknowledgement that they did it wrong.

There was nothing wrong with wanting to create a tablet friendly UI... nothing at all. What was wrong was trying to foist it onto desktop users. Wanna make a tablet UI? Great! Do that in ADDITION to what you already had *AND* make them compatible with each other so that a user or a program can work easily in either.

The desktop isn't going away any time soon. The very notion that people are ready to move on into the tablet hype world is ridiculous.

It's understandable that no one would want to be left behind or to have a fear that you might be considered late to the party or irrelevant if you don't have one ready when the market wants it, but to push it onto the market before it wants it? What were they thinking?

And I'm sorry developers might have low morale, but that bad smell they've been wondering about isn't coming from the breath of the users complaining, it's because they had their heads up their asses... which might explain why they couldn't hear the users...

The war with Canonical

[jbolden]

I think one of the things that often gets forgotten was that Gnome 3 ended up in a war with Canonical in March 2011. Canonical represented somewhere between 50-80% of the user base. Once Canonical came to believe that the Gnome foundation simply would not listen to their point of view and their only alternative was to fork things went downhill badly. I think its time for Gnome to admit they lost this war.

Canonical instead of pushing the advantages of Gnome 3 focused heavily on the minus. Instead of easing their customer base into Gnome 3 they moved them away from it towards their Unity / Wayland vision. Canonical could have helped to soften some of the rough edges and at the same time Gnome thought deeply about consistency and functionality issues which have haunted Canonical.

The most popular Gnome desktop is now Cinnamon which is a fork. The second most popular is Mate which is a rejection of Gnome 3 entirely. KDE developers consider Gnome to have bullied and lied to them about cooperation so Gnome is likely to see less cooperation.

There are some brilliant aspects of Gnome 3. And I could see it evolving into truly the best desktop OS around. But it won't have the time or support to do that, in the current state of alienation. They have minor technical problems but large political problems. It is time to address the politics and compromise a bit to get back to a situation where they aren't decaying rapidly.

Re:Extensions

[MikeBabcock]

I don't want to think where I put my windows. I know my personal browser sessions are on 3, along with any game I might be playing, my E-mail and other contact managers are on 1, and my database interface and Eclipse are running on 2.

When I want to save a window for later, I toss it over to 4.

I shouldn't have to think about it. That's how proper organization works.

Imagine for a moment if your clothing drawers automatically created and deleted drawers so you had to figure out where you'd put something, and if you took the last sock out of the sock drawer, the shirt drawer wouldn't be where you expected it. We use metaphors on desktops to help users organize their data, including the folder system. Making those metaphors less realistic kills their ability to use them for organization.

for languages require IME

[causeless]

in Japan, to launch Gnome shell,

1. click "Dash" or hit Windows-key.
2. check IME is disabled.
3. Alt+Space to disable IME.
4. wait a moment.
5. double-check IME is disabled now.
6. type "Tanmatu" and hit Space.
7. check IME suggests "" ("terminal", in Japanese) properly.
8. hit Enter twice.
9. Alt-Space to disable IME.

What's a great userbility!!

There are no shortcut like Windows, type "term", Enter.
and additionaly, Japanese users must guess which translated words associated to what one want to get.
Terminal, shell, command-prompt and many other words may be translated to "". Accept both English and Japanese in launcher does not help us.

Re:Staying with gnome2

[epyT-R]

You don't make a case for the gnome 3 changes here. You just make assumptions about the people who criticize it. Old stuff isn't necessarily worse than new stuff, and new stuff isn't necessarily worse than old stuff. They both must stand on their merits. This trend of minimalism in modern UIs and applications was fine until they started cutting needed features and/or flexibility for its sake. Gnome 3 is doing this along with windows 8, and osx. I'm sorry, but I don't need all these assumptions made about where I keep my windows on a workstation class machine. They are not tablets.

Change for the sake of change isn't innovation.

Re:Staying with gnome2

[techno-vampire]

Or you can try actually learning the new system - it really is better.

What you mean is, "It's better for me." I want to be able to put my panel where I want it, not where the devs want it and I don't think I should have to install a third-party extension to do that. I don't want to have to use gestures to get to a list of applications, I want to use both icons and menus. I want to be the one who decides how many workspaces I have, and what programs appear on which. AFAIK, none of those things are possible in Gnome 3, which is why I now use Xfce, where they are. I might add that after a year of fighting with Ubuntu's Unity DE, which is pretty much a clone of Gnome 3, my sister gave up on it and now uses Xfce as well.