That's a rather long article for stating the obvious. It worries me a little that the author seems to have just found out about it though, and what's even weirder is the conclusion, which says that now he found out where the anger is from he can enjoy it while working on as usual.
As a maintainer and volunteer on some open source projects, the reason for CADT is that popular projects receive significantly more bug reports than could ever be handled by their volunteers. We're just volunteers and you can't just throw more developers at the problem. In the end, you get what you pay for. Nothing.
> significantly more bug reports than could ever be handled by their volunteers
Maybe I misunderstood this. So are you saying that the same volunteers can handle a total rewrite of the module maintaining its specified (hopefully) behavior, while remaining incapable of fixing its bugs?
If the bug is still valid, then don't close it. It's not a competition for time to fix! If you don't know if the bug is fixed, don't close it. Certainly don't ask the reporter to log it again!
The bit about psychology is "obvious", but the argument falls apart when trying to get from that to the conclusions.
It's true that taking away something that people count on makes them unhappy. To declare, however that this is the sole or main reason for the widespread rejection of the Gnome changes requires more evidence. It is definitely false in the case of many users (myself included).
It's really just a variant of the old line "you dislike this only because it's different; but try it our way and you'll find it's better". This is a dishonest, and frankly an offensive rhetorical trick. It presumes to know the reader's mind better than the reader does; implies that familiarity is the only reason anyone ever prefers one thing over another; and assumes that all change is always good - all of which is absurd.
Similarly in the linked article, the author pretends that there is no objection based on the actual merits of the software: in other words, users object that the removal makes the software less useful, and the writer pretends to misunderstand the complaint as "we now have n - 1 features instead of n features". He even arrogantly says that some features they "shouldn't have had in the first place" - when in reality, people complain because they were using the feature for something they cared about and aren't satisfied with the new way.
The really important hidden premise of apologists like this is that there are no intrinsic merits of one design over another - that it's only a matter of style and fashion and what's familiar, and there's never any factor of one way being intrinsically better or worse suited to the interaction of human and device. That's a big assumption, but once they've put in a huge amount of work based on it, they can't even admit that anyone could have any intelligent objection, and defensively blame any dissent on an irrational emotional response.
The same observations apply in the case of Ubuntu Unity and Windows 8: the root cause of their failure is a sort of paternalism where the GUI designers disregard what users actually prefer, and can't even admit that the preferences are based on practical workflow considerations rather than emotional reactions.
Any users pretending to have had need for capital letters are just expressing their disgruntlement over losing something they felt they possessed. That doesn't mean we think users are stupid, just that they have no idea what they actually need or use.
furthermore in the upcoming release we will complete the process by eliminating clutter such as punctuation and paragraphs we welcome comments on this but we will merely read them smilingly with a bag of popcorn
Yes, this. I'm not angry over the removal of compact list mode from Nautilus because of "loss of freedom", but because it's the mode I find superior to all other view modes.
Is he trying to imply that he is in charge and we are just those silly peons who don't understand motivation of their ruler? Because that's a complete bullshit.
While I tend to agree with most things they did in the past few years, some are just plain idiotic. For example the type to search instead of prefix matching in nautilus just plain doesn't work, while the original feature have been replaced. I feel like I've received a 7 inch tablet to hack on a C project.
Yep. I laughed that their response to users complaining about removing features is not to question if the feature was useful or not, but to claim that it is simply the world raging against this idea of its freedom's taken away without any acknowledgement that the feature may have actually been useful.
While I understand gnome gets a lot of hate and that they might take up that tact as a defense mechanism instead of actually dealing with it, it bodes really poorly for their user interface.
Yes it's amazingly patronizing to assume that the people were wrong given I rarely see any statistical evidence or usability studies behind GNOME changes. It's quite possible they were right and the GNOME devs were wrong. Or, even more likely, that they are both right for two different groups and that feature X could perhaps be removed from an icon bar but not from a submenu.
Too often in the past GNOME removed the availability of a feature entirely. The people using that feature "owned" it, thus following the first quote the removal impinged on their "property", and then the GNOME devs would insult people for wanting it because it was "wrong", impinging on their "honour". It's only through assuming GNOME devs are infallible and the people are wrong that allows this guy to use the second quote, which boils down to "children want their toys", to cancel the first and then "smilingly fall back in my chair and enjoy reading mean comments with a bag of popcorn".
Also I agree with the others regarding the lack of capitalization, but I suppose we are all "wrong" on this.
Poe's law applies to the OP - I'm genuinely confused as to whether this blog post is a subtle satire of the uncaring aloofness of Gnome developers, or if it's the real thing.
The no capitals thing is just icing on the cake. "Capitalization is pointless so I removed it"
I noticed right away that the title had no capital letters. But I didn't notice that the body had none until I read this comment and looked back over the text. Neither time did the lack of capitals bother me.
I didn't went past the first paragraph before opening Chrome DOM inspector and checking if some "text-transform:lowercase;" had been forgotten somewhere, but no it's apparently on purpose.
Agreed, and it's a perfect example of what's wrong with the GNOME attitude. Capitals exist for a reason. People who can read at more than a snail's pace use them to scan for the start of each sentence as quickly as possible (milliseconds do count), but apparently Mr. Siegel isn't in that category himself so he considers the feature expendable. Then he even changes capitalization in quotes, which he should know is wrong according to every style guide ever written, but those guides were written by non-GNOME people so of course he treats them as inferior to his own "Must. Be. Different!" anti-aesthetic. There are some important lessons here about the use of "it's open source" as an excuse for developer laziness/intransigence, but that should probably be another essay.
For a long time, I avoided capitals in exactly this way. It wasn't as negative as the reasons you've suggested. I figured that capitals were unnecessary for parsing because I didn't have difficulty reading my own writing without them. It wasn't until I began writing in larger paragraphs that I noticed what you've said here—that capitals do actually count in terms of speed.
I wouldn't be so quick to attribute this to arrogance or nonconformity. I noted that the brevity of individual paragraphs is similar to the way I had been writing. Mixed with the font, which does make it easier to catch the beginnings of sentences, it's entirely possible that he's making exactly the same mistake I made in exactly the way I made it—such that he hasn't yet noticed it does have an impact on reading speed.
Edit: Some of the other comments take a similar view, so I do want to point out that I may lack context. I don't use GNOME and I'm not particularly well-informed on the subject. My comment refers only to the lack of capitals and an anecdote about my own experience with avoiding capitals.
Totally agree. It feels like author just doesn't want me to to read that...
On the same note, I don't understand why in some countries signs on highways use all-capital letters. Words written that way are actually harder and slower to read [1] than ones written with proper capitalization.
In general I have the same reaction as you, but in this specific case I think there's a connection. Both the cummings-esque lack of capitals and the general GNOME decision-making process seem to have their roots in a mindset that values "style" over respect for others - users, quoted authors, whoever is deemed "outside" with respect to the post author's own small circle. While comments that focus only on the unfortunate orthography without making that connection might be a waste of time, I think using the visual representation as a symbol of the underlying problem has some validity. Maybe if we all talked about gNOme (as in "NO" to every user request) it would make the point more clearly.
I rarely join in the sideline / distracting conversations on HN comment threads, but I do genuinely believe in this case it acts as a mirror to the content. Absolutely not going to downvote you for pointing out the disconnect, though, hopefully no one else did, either.
I really think it shows a disconnect between what the author thinks is good design and what IS good design.
But speaking of substance, there wasn't really much there. He talked about users like they were an inconvenience and were unreasonable, and that they had some odd psychological issue that needed correcting. Yet he never addressed the genuinely useful features that were removed, or the feeling by users that if they used features in Gnome they might one day lose them, even if the need them.
I voted you up because I think your comment is honest and written in good faith.
The author's lack of capitalization is not important enough to me to write an article about it and post it to HN, but it was important enough to me to point it out in a comment on the forum page discussing the article.
It seems to me to exemplify exactly what is wrong with the author's approach to features... and by extension, with the GNOME development team's approach to the same.
Sure! What he says is essentially "I used to be confused and hurt by users' complaints and desires. Then I devised a pop-psych theory for why users have desires, and having done that, I can confidently tell them to go to hell."
This is terrible, terrible design philosophy and no one should ever listen to it. The end.
Imagine, if you will, that Gnome developers had control over keyboards. The first key to be removed would be sysreq, then scroll-lock, and break. And it was dubbed Keyboard 2.0
In Keyboard 2.1, the caps lock key was removed as you can use the shift key. The Windows key was surplus to requirements, there's a perfectly good alt key.
Fast forward to Keyboard 3.0. There is no longer a control key (hold down alt for 2 seconds!), numlock is gone (the top row has numbers), cursor keys gone (you can use a mouse to move around).
In Keyboard 3.1 they removed the shift key as stylistically capitals aren't necessary.
in keyboard 3.2 they removed the comma and semicolon. these really aren't necessary as you don't need to pause when reading.
in keyboard 33 there is no need for single quotes because you should not use contractions. that just causes confusion and besides the amount of debates and derision around it were getting ridiculous. justification: world peace and an end to grammar nazis.
in keyboard 35 they are seriously considering removing the enter key the exclamation mark and any characters that require umlauts. this will help with a cleaner text rendering codebase.
Hated lack of caps in zines, still hate it in blogs. It's an affectation of profundity sorta inherited from e.e. cummings, but mostly from his 60s imitators.
Now if people would start tech blogging in rhyme or iambic pentameter, that might be awesome.
The GNOME situation frustrates me as a would-be-linux-desktop-app developer. Thankfully, Qt has been getting better and better, and I hope to see a usable and powerful DE written in it sometime soon: Unity, while nice, sometimes feels a bit lacking, and is far too controlled by Canonical.
GNOME used to be the go-to "Community" DE that I relied on, and I tinkered around with using it as my GUI toolkit as well. Now, it doesn't feel community run at all, and as a GUI toolkit, Qt is much nicer.
I know a lot of people hate KDE because of the early 4.x builds. It has gotten a lot better now, and it's constantly getting even better.
If this is the case, he should take it for a spin. I find that it's the most customizable and user centric DE around.
There are a lot of settings you can tweak, probably too much for some, but I know each time I test Gnome/Unity/Xfce/Lxde/Cinnamon etc. I miss a lot of easily accessible settings.
The community is also great, there is a saying: KDE is the community, not the software.
Last time I tried to use it, it had plenty of options, just not the particular ones I wanted.
I generally like a very minimal interface along the lines of Openbox. Right click for menu, middle click for window list, windows minimize to desktop icons, scroll wheel cycles through virtual desktops. Maximized windows don't cover a few pixels along an edge, so I always have access to the desktop. The only taskbar type stuff visible is a clock and the system tray, which on the computer I'm using right now auto-hide in the upper left. (I optimized for screen space on a netbook that didn't have any, and found I liked it anyway.)
I'm happy to spend a while wading through settings to get this set up as I like, but KDE won't let me (not that I really blame them). However, I do find it annoying when it's billed as the most customizable DE out there. In terms of the color of any particular thingamabob, absolutely. In terms of major differences in overall layout, not so much.
Xfce and LXDE have always worked flawlessly for me.
FWIW, I liked KDE's early 4.x builds. I thought it seemed like a major improvement both functionally and visually over 3.x.
The only problem is, I've never been able to use KDE for longer than about a day before experiencing major (read: show-stopping) performance regressions and severe crashes (read: listening to music while programming, suddenly whole desktop disappears and it drops back to the login manager, or I'm beset by dozens of dialog boxes about SIGSEGV errors buried in 30-thread spaghetti messes while my music mysteriously stops). I've also run into serious data corruption issues where something nuked the Nepomuk databases or something else nuked the Plasma widget configs.
As a result, I've found KDE 4.x completely unusable. I try it now and then to see if they've fixed anything, but as of 4.10, I still can't use it for more than a few hours without something blowing up.
So, to me, the community is irrelevant if the software is useless.
I used to use KDE, back when I used a Linux desktop. That was in the 2.x days.
I even used Konqueror as my main browser (circa 2000-2002) -- the alternative was the unwieldy Mozilla.
So, here's an observation about the community: back then, I read dot.kde.org (the official "KDE news" blog), and it would fill with 10-15 news stories every day or two. Each story would have a 50+ comment thread. Now, if you go there, there are one month old stories in the first page, and most stories have zero or 1 comment.
I don't know about the use base, but the active community has definetily shrank.
(There were also tons of announcements, new projects, theme sites, interviews with KDE hackers, this Mosfet guy, the Kompany, etc etc).
I've found any change in the software I develop and sell can produce a "I don't like this change" response, whether it is removing features, changing features, or adding something.
As a software developer and producer, one needs to develop thick skin. If I make a change and one person complains, I need to remind myself that other people like it.
However, if many people complain about a specific change, then I should listen, try to understand their perspective, and consider rolling back and/or adding an option to have things either the old way or the new way.
With the "add an option" approach, however, one must be careful not to gain lots and lots of UI-cluttering options in the Preferences.
The "add an option" approach can also result in more complicated customer support - users inadvertently turn off features/changes in the Preferences.
So there are a number of issues being balanced here: the customer's (or user's) dislike for change; the potentially real complaint that the change has worsened the software for some users; keeping the software flexible; but not drowning the user with too many unnecessary options; nor making customer support too complicated.
What a disappointing end to a post that started with such great potential. So you read (and agree with apparently) about why people don't like to have things taken away from them and then, you just sit back and enjoy the reaction.
I would think that having understood the reaction, you might have tried to lessen it, or re-frame taking features away into something else (even if the end result is the same).
So, remove features -- even incredibly useful ones like f'ing drag & drop, no drag & drop across the entire interface! -- and kick back in Prince'ly fashion enjoying the cries of the masses.
What he's suggesting, depending on which of Machiavelli's kingdom types the author is referring to, is actually either the wrong approach (the people revolt [leave Gnome]) or the ruthless tyrannical approach (crush [ignore] the cries of the masses and force the prince's system on the people without any lenience [concessions]).
Blog poster basically comes across as a bit of a sociopath.
Gnome 3 is not "all" bad, BTW, but some of the (missing) functionality is a daily PITA.
"Blog poster basically comes across as a bit of a sociopath."
Seems like it represents the general view by users of the Gnome team. He points out that the perception of the Gnome team is anti-user, that they are tone deaf and don't care enough about the community. He doesn't argue against it, mind you, and then goes on to largely reinforce the correctness of the called-out viewpoint. He was reading The Prince and now he gets what all those dumb serfs were rioting about.
I would really like to know where this bizzare attitude has come from. At what point exactly did the gnome devs decide that they were at war with their users?
GNOME developers have been well known twats for a long long time. They tinker and remove things for the better all the time, usually sighting some crap UX survey or some such nonsense. They also have a passionate hatred of giving users choice.
Yeah great, you go stay over there with your dwindling band of Gnome 3 supplicants, I'll be over here with the people who've simply walked away. Ubuntu Studio, XFCE, no worries.
Gnome 2 was SO configurable that I couldn't get on with Gnome 3 at all. I haven't tried it in well over a year at this point.. so I can't speak to recent changes. There was a lot I actually liked about it--but way too many features were either missing or narrowly restricted for me to build a fast and comfortable workflow on. I went to KDE for a while and then went all out, had a much better time.. then I questioned the need for a DE at all and have been using xmonad by itself for most of the past year. So.. thank you Gnome developers for making my question the need for having a DE!
If I wanted a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all, company-approved UX.. I'd buy one in a pretty silver box.
This guy just comes across as incredibly smug. Does the ego-trip come free when you buy a ticket to chase the silver-box UX for your own product and its completely different userbase with entirely different needs and expectations?
IMHO Xfce4 has reached the level that now it does the Gnome 2 thing better than Gnome 2 did. (Just needs some tweaking, if you don't like the default blue theme.)
Gnome 1 was so configurable, that I couldn't get on with Gnome 2 at all. I haven't tried it in over 10 years at this point... So I can't speak to recent changes. There was a lot I actually liked about it [Gnome 1] -- but way too many features were either missing or narrowly restricted for me to build a fast and comfortable workflow on. I went to KDE for a while and then went all out, switched to Xmonad, and had a much better time. Then I questioned the need for a DE at all. Unfortunately, with all the problems I run into in keeping my Haskell libraries up-to-date, that I decided to try Gnome 3, and I've been using it by itself for most of the past couple years. So... Thank you Gnome developers for reminding me that you have no clue what users need!
...
No, seriously, I think Gnome 1 had a lot over Gnome 2, and it amuses me to no end that people prefer Gnome 2 over Gnome 3.
Ah, another missive from a software developer who regards users as a mere annoyance, just discovered Machiavelli, and favors intuition over feedback from those users (because intuition always trumps evidence, unless you're A/B testing the color of your "sign up now!" button, in which case evidence always trumps intuition). Never seen anything like this before.
If you like Gnome, great. If you don't like Gnome, you should use something else. Arguing this old subject hasn't yet accomplished anything, and there are plenty of alternatives available now. (I really like KDE4.)
If project developers are genuinely screwing their pooch, then a stampede to alternatives will convince them far more thoroughly than even the most well-crafted internet argument. If there's no stampede, then people are just arguing personal preferences in the face of popular preferences, and they'd still be better off switching to something else.
Save passionate arguing for situations in which it can do some good.
> If you like Gnome, great. If you don't like Gnome, you should use something else. Arguing this old subject hasn't yet accomplished anything, and there are plenty of alternatives available now. (I really like KDE4.)
The problem is that a lot of people liked Gnome2 but dislike Gnome3. They feel betrayed because the Gnome team killed their favorite desktop environment on a whim, and that sort of thing isn't supposed to happen with open source.
Due to Gnome 2 / 3 name conflicts maintaining Gnome 2 is fairly difficult.
Basically the Gnome devs wanted to go in a new direction and are abusing their powers to kill off the old product. Users have legitimate reason to to upset.
The take it or fork it mentality is pretty entrenched in many opensource projects. So that is not really surprising. (Of course this is not always practical; but hey, people online argue philosophy over practicality, right :P)
It's good that Gnome developers recognize that users do get unhappy when Gnome removes features or makes non-backwards compatible changes.
Next step is of course to find understanding that users' reactions are based on numerous reasons, rather than originating from one source. Losing access to features previously found is one cause, but so is the lack of rational and balanced discussions explaining why the features were removed, and missing instructions on how to get similar functionality in Gnome 3, or the lack of tools to migrate old Gnome 2 applications to Gnome 3. To take a comparing example of Gnome2->Gnome3, lets look at Python 2->Python 3 and see what the Python Software Foundation did right.
#1: Features removed were announced years before they were removed, with clear instructions on how to migrate to better and improved features.
#2: 2to3 was invented, an automatic translator for source code from Python 2 to Python 3, to make it easy for developers to migrate over to new version.
#3: Any feature that was removed had clear documentation and discussion that explained why it was removed, and what users could do to move forward.
#4: New features were back-ported from Python 3 and made available in Python 2. This allowed users to test out things from the security and familiarity of Python 2, without getting tangled in all the changes at once in Python 3.
#5: Python 2 and Python 3 was/is developed in parallel, giving people plenty of glimpses (and warnings) of the future, and insight over what would be future safe activities.
Gnome 3 did none of these things. One could argue that there were practical reasons why, but not doing any of those things will hurt a project. At any rate, I have not seen Gnome 3 give any practical reasons why they did such an abrupt move from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3, beyond that they "had to".
#6: The target audience is generally one who is interested in computers and is less resistant to change.
If they had created a new product instead of bumping Gnome's version number all these problems would have gone away because the user's expectation is to have something different instead of an evolution of an existing product.
I'm not very familiar with the Gnome team, but isn't this just a resource problem?
They're trying to build a better product, and they're only a bunch of part-time volunteers.
At some point they had a bunch of features, but to keep up with the other desktops (Aero, Quartz) they had to focus on rearchitecting and, being a small team, there haven't enough manpower to keep all the features.
I also don't think language (api's) are not at all comparable to desktop environments. There's just so much going on in a desktop environment.
>> They're trying to build a better product, and they're only a bunch of part-time volunteers.
I thought quite a few of them worked for Redhat?
>> At some point they had a bunch of features, but to keep up with the other desktops (Aero, Quartz) they had to focus on rearchitecting and, being a small team, there haven't enough manpower to keep all the features.
That seems a bit of a rosy view of what happened. A cynic might say that they decided to scrap everything and start again, users be damned, and went out of their way to make 3/Shell incompatible with 2 to force people away from it, announcing that it was now abandoned and of no further interest. Then, as now, they explained how everyone that didn't like that move was wrong and stupid, and they set about making the desktop experience that you will absolutely love because we say so and if you don't do it our way you're a curmudgeon and intellectually subnormal.
> A cynic might say that they decided to scrap everything and start again
and not only this cynic would be wrong, but he would also be full of crap, because it's such a trivial thing to check in the public repositories, public mailing list archives, and public bug tracking system.
but, obviously, crapping on a bunch of volunteers trying to work on the project they like is easier.
That's certainly how it has looked from the outside.
Are you saying they didn't force incompatibility with Gnome 2? Or that they didn't just decide to change everything to exactly how they wanted the desktop, regardless of users?
Maybe they didn't scrap some of the underlying libraries, but the whole look, layout, interaction pattern/user flow and pretty much everything else was a total change.
They weren't really competing with Aero/Quartz, the most direct competition would be Android/iOS and the abomination known as WinRT. I don't know what happened in 2010 or so, but it seems like all the GUI developers collectively decided to jump off the same cliff by gutting the desktop experience and trying to re-create it for tablets; never mind that there's still a whole bunch of people that would like to use a GUI on non-tablet devices.
> I'm not very familiar with the Gnome team, but isn't this just a resource problem?
How much time that is spent on packaging, documenting existing features, building communication systems, and doing cool new features is indeed hard resource questions for a project manager. Then there is policy questions which effect resources.
Python demands PEPs to be written before changes is considered. That demand for PEPs is less a resource question, and more a policy question. It forces developer to write down in words what they try to accomplish with a change, and also write down what effect it has on users.
In my opinion, the community reaction to gnome3 is not very surprising. Its a result of "less restrictive" developer process and few efforts into mitigation of community outrage. I can only hope they will find some insight from other projects, and start to handle feature changes with more user awareness.
This is so bizarre. He's not even taking the Machiavellian advice, which would be to actually _not_ take stuff away from your users (assuming he wants happy users, which, I guess, doesn't actually concern him).
Instead he's satisfied having de-constructed users' reactions, and just leaves it at that. It's like saying I figured out _why_ punching you in the face will make you upset, so I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the show.
Removing features that people use makes them unhappy because they can no longer use them. That goes for hiding features, like (for example) hiding icons on the desktop, een when in classic mode.
Or the up button in Nautilus. Or any one of the dozens of useful things they removed. I was quite a fan of Gnome 2.x, but the "remove features people use because we are right and they are wrong" mentality means I switched back to Windows, and run VirtualBix for my coding, debugging, etc.
I enjoyed this article right up until the end, when I expected the author to use his new-found knowledge to suggest a method for removing features that caused less friction. Instead, his response was more "Now that I know why people behave this way, I don't need to care about it." Doesn't seem at all constructive to me.
People loved Gnome 2. I don't know if they loved it enough to pay for all the devs needed to keep it going.
I really don't understand the "do not let people customise anything" attitude. I agree that supporting users who have made customisations is annoying and hard; just force people to return to a default config before they make any support requests. I agree that sane defaults are nice, and that option screens are ugly; offer sane defaults, and hide all the config stuff in a text file.
My uncaffeinated early-morning mind read the headline as why removing feautes makes people HAPPY. I think that would be a much more interesting article.
Aside from GNOME, one can also look at the Opera Browser community. Many of us were skeptical of the switch to being based on Chromium not because of browser, but because of the fear Opera would throw out many of the powerful features its user base has relied on for years.
Heck, Opera wasn't even going to add in normal bookmarking until they received a huge community backlash against it. Many of us have hundreds of bookmarks and the alternative they were providing[1] would have made it a burden to find anything useful when one has more than a few dozen bookmarks.
In short, removing features makes people unhappy when they rely on them being there in order to be productive. Adding new features or dramatically altering the way long time ones work, sure go ahead, as long as current users are given the option to keep using those long time features (ones more than a few years old) the same way they expect by undoing some option in settings. Some might scoff at this as being impossible, but that was how Opera actually functioned from the beginning up until the switchover to Chromium in Opera 15.
This is of course total off topic, but since a lot of GNOME-bashing is already happening in the comments here, I would just like to state that I am very, very happy with GNOME3.
It perfectly fits my use case (running a few apps fully maximised) and gets out of my way. Also, it is rock solid and has never crashed on me.
There are several WMs which were specifically developed from the perspective of being minimal and getting out of the way (Awesome WM comes to mind).
One of the main causes behind the bashing is that a perfectly stable Gnome 2 (which was a more mainstream/"full featured" WM) was butchered to create something which took out a lot of functionality people _actually_ use.
Obviously your use case, being a much simpler subset of what people typically do with their WMs, would fit in with most of the WMs so maybe the hoopla surprises you.
Perhaps this is the kind of thing GNOME devs talk about among themselves, but to write it for public consumption and submit to HN, ostensibly looking for validation (or to troll), is a pretty epic PR fail. Not only is the author not taking Machiavelli's advice, he's gloating that he isn't.
I don't think removing features is a problem in it self but the Gnome product has been run like Facebook or any fucking website the last couple of years. Features come and go between releases, half implemented changes trough out the desktop and so on.
Normally when you make a products you decide the features and when those are stable, they are set in stone trough out the history of that whole/stable version. If the Gnome team was serious about their product in anyway they would not even pretend to have a stable product, but kept 2x as the stable release until the whole feature set was coherent between all applications.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadhttp://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
Be sure to note the date on this.
Maybe I misunderstood this. So are you saying that the same volunteers can handle a total rewrite of the module maintaining its specified (hopefully) behavior, while remaining incapable of fixing its bugs?
It's true that taking away something that people count on makes them unhappy. To declare, however that this is the sole or main reason for the widespread rejection of the Gnome changes requires more evidence. It is definitely false in the case of many users (myself included).
It's really just a variant of the old line "you dislike this only because it's different; but try it our way and you'll find it's better". This is a dishonest, and frankly an offensive rhetorical trick. It presumes to know the reader's mind better than the reader does; implies that familiarity is the only reason anyone ever prefers one thing over another; and assumes that all change is always good - all of which is absurd.
Similarly in the linked article, the author pretends that there is no objection based on the actual merits of the software: in other words, users object that the removal makes the software less useful, and the writer pretends to misunderstand the complaint as "we now have n - 1 features instead of n features". He even arrogantly says that some features they "shouldn't have had in the first place" - when in reality, people complain because they were using the feature for something they cared about and aren't satisfied with the new way.
The really important hidden premise of apologists like this is that there are no intrinsic merits of one design over another - that it's only a matter of style and fashion and what's familiar, and there's never any factor of one way being intrinsically better or worse suited to the interaction of human and device. That's a big assumption, but once they've put in a huge amount of work based on it, they can't even admit that anyone could have any intelligent objection, and defensively blame any dissent on an irrational emotional response.
The same observations apply in the case of Ubuntu Unity and Windows 8: the root cause of their failure is a sort of paternalism where the GUI designers disregard what users actually prefer, and can't even admit that the preferences are based on practical workflow considerations rather than emotional reactions.
Any users pretending to have had need for capital letters are just expressing their disgruntlement over losing something they felt they possessed. That doesn't mean we think users are stupid, just that they have no idea what they actually need or use.
And it doesn't surprise me at all that Gnome Devs read Machiavelli.
While I tend to agree with most things they did in the past few years, some are just plain idiotic. For example the type to search instead of prefix matching in nautilus just plain doesn't work, while the original feature have been replaced. I feel like I've received a 7 inch tablet to hack on a C project.
While I understand gnome gets a lot of hate and that they might take up that tact as a defense mechanism instead of actually dealing with it, it bodes really poorly for their user interface.
Too often in the past GNOME removed the availability of a feature entirely. The people using that feature "owned" it, thus following the first quote the removal impinged on their "property", and then the GNOME devs would insult people for wanting it because it was "wrong", impinging on their "honour". It's only through assuming GNOME devs are infallible and the people are wrong that allows this guy to use the second quote, which boils down to "children want their toys", to cancel the first and then "smilingly fall back in my chair and enjoy reading mean comments with a bag of popcorn".
Also I agree with the others regarding the lack of capitalization, but I suppose we are all "wrong" on this.
The no capitals thing is just icing on the cake. "Capitalization is pointless so I removed it"
It feels like you are just trying to look special by not following a thousand-year-old standard.
Then after reading it again once or twice, I saw there were periods where I did not expect them.
Then I read the whole thing and I now wish I had stopped after two sentences like so many others.
I wouldn't be so quick to attribute this to arrogance or nonconformity. I noted that the brevity of individual paragraphs is similar to the way I had been writing. Mixed with the font, which does make it easier to catch the beginnings of sentences, it's entirely possible that he's making exactly the same mistake I made in exactly the way I made it—such that he hasn't yet noticed it does have an impact on reading speed.
Edit: Some of the other comments take a similar view, so I do want to point out that I may lack context. I don't use GNOME and I'm not particularly well-informed on the subject. My comment refers only to the lack of capitals and an anecdote about my own experience with avoiding capitals.
On the same note, I don't understand why in some countries signs on highways use all-capital letters. Words written that way are actually harder and slower to read [1] than ones written with proper capitalization.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps#Readability
Because of that all of the old signs were in all-caps. New signs with proper capitalization look odd.
Can we please talk about what he says?
Is the topic in any way related to good blog design?
There are quite a few blogs without capitalization and if it is really so important to you feel free to write about it.
IMHO All those comments on design/grammar/font/... in every discussion on HN are mere distractions and add no value.
But speaking of substance, there wasn't really much there. He talked about users like they were an inconvenience and were unreasonable, and that they had some odd psychological issue that needed correcting. Yet he never addressed the genuinely useful features that were removed, or the feeling by users that if they used features in Gnome they might one day lose them, even if the need them.
The author's lack of capitalization is not important enough to me to write an article about it and post it to HN, but it was important enough to me to point it out in a comment on the forum page discussing the article.
It seems to me to exemplify exactly what is wrong with the author's approach to features... and by extension, with the GNOME development team's approach to the same.
This is terrible, terrible design philosophy and no one should ever listen to it. The end.
In Keyboard 2.1, the caps lock key was removed as you can use the shift key. The Windows key was surplus to requirements, there's a perfectly good alt key.
Fast forward to Keyboard 3.0. There is no longer a control key (hold down alt for 2 seconds!), numlock is gone (the top row has numbers), cursor keys gone (you can use a mouse to move around).
In Keyboard 3.1 they removed the shift key as stylistically capitals aren't necessary.
in keyboard 3.2 they removed the comma and semicolon. these really aren't necessary as you don't need to pause when reading.
in keyboard 33 there is no need for single quotes because you should not use contractions. that just causes confusion and besides the amount of debates and derision around it were getting ridiculous. justification: world peace and an end to grammar nazis.
in keyboard 35 they are seriously considering removing the enter key the exclamation mark and any characters that require umlauts. this will help with a cleaner text rendering codebase.
Now if people would start tech blogging in rhyme or iambic pentameter, that might be awesome.
GNOME used to be the go-to "Community" DE that I relied on, and I tinkered around with using it as my GUI toolkit as well. Now, it doesn't feel community run at all, and as a GUI toolkit, Qt is much nicer.
I wonder if this will change in the future?
You mean like KDE?
Joking aside, he is obviously aware of KDE and didn't mention it for a reason, presumably because it's not what he wants to see.
I know a lot of people hate KDE because of the early 4.x builds. It has gotten a lot better now, and it's constantly getting even better.
If this is the case, he should take it for a spin. I find that it's the most customizable and user centric DE around.
There are a lot of settings you can tweak, probably too much for some, but I know each time I test Gnome/Unity/Xfce/Lxde/Cinnamon etc. I miss a lot of easily accessible settings.
The community is also great, there is a saying: KDE is the community, not the software.
I generally like a very minimal interface along the lines of Openbox. Right click for menu, middle click for window list, windows minimize to desktop icons, scroll wheel cycles through virtual desktops. Maximized windows don't cover a few pixels along an edge, so I always have access to the desktop. The only taskbar type stuff visible is a clock and the system tray, which on the computer I'm using right now auto-hide in the upper left. (I optimized for screen space on a netbook that didn't have any, and found I liked it anyway.)
I'm happy to spend a while wading through settings to get this set up as I like, but KDE won't let me (not that I really blame them). However, I do find it annoying when it's billed as the most customizable DE out there. In terms of the color of any particular thingamabob, absolutely. In terms of major differences in overall layout, not so much.
Xfce and LXDE have always worked flawlessly for me.
The only problem is, I've never been able to use KDE for longer than about a day before experiencing major (read: show-stopping) performance regressions and severe crashes (read: listening to music while programming, suddenly whole desktop disappears and it drops back to the login manager, or I'm beset by dozens of dialog boxes about SIGSEGV errors buried in 30-thread spaghetti messes while my music mysteriously stops). I've also run into serious data corruption issues where something nuked the Nepomuk databases or something else nuked the Plasma widget configs.
As a result, I've found KDE 4.x completely unusable. I try it now and then to see if they've fixed anything, but as of 4.10, I still can't use it for more than a few hours without something blowing up.
So, to me, the community is irrelevant if the software is useless.
I even used Konqueror as my main browser (circa 2000-2002) -- the alternative was the unwieldy Mozilla.
So, here's an observation about the community: back then, I read dot.kde.org (the official "KDE news" blog), and it would fill with 10-15 news stories every day or two. Each story would have a 50+ comment thread. Now, if you go there, there are one month old stories in the first page, and most stories have zero or 1 comment.
I don't know about the use base, but the active community has definetily shrank.
(There were also tons of announcements, new projects, theme sites, interviews with KDE hackers, this Mosfet guy, the Kompany, etc etc).
As a software developer and producer, one needs to develop thick skin. If I make a change and one person complains, I need to remind myself that other people like it.
However, if many people complain about a specific change, then I should listen, try to understand their perspective, and consider rolling back and/or adding an option to have things either the old way or the new way.
With the "add an option" approach, however, one must be careful not to gain lots and lots of UI-cluttering options in the Preferences.
The "add an option" approach can also result in more complicated customer support - users inadvertently turn off features/changes in the Preferences.
So there are a number of issues being balanced here: the customer's (or user's) dislike for change; the potentially real complaint that the change has worsened the software for some users; keeping the software flexible; but not drowning the user with too many unnecessary options; nor making customer support too complicated.
I would think that having understood the reaction, you might have tried to lessen it, or re-frame taking features away into something else (even if the end result is the same).
What he's suggesting, depending on which of Machiavelli's kingdom types the author is referring to, is actually either the wrong approach (the people revolt [leave Gnome]) or the ruthless tyrannical approach (crush [ignore] the cries of the masses and force the prince's system on the people without any lenience [concessions]).
Blog poster basically comes across as a bit of a sociopath.
Gnome 3 is not "all" bad, BTW, but some of the (missing) functionality is a daily PITA.
Seems like it represents the general view by users of the Gnome team. He points out that the perception of the Gnome team is anti-user, that they are tone deaf and don't care enough about the community. He doesn't argue against it, mind you, and then goes on to largely reinforce the correctness of the called-out viewpoint. He was reading The Prince and now he gets what all those dumb serfs were rioting about.
If I wanted a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all, company-approved UX.. I'd buy one in a pretty silver box.
This guy just comes across as incredibly smug. Does the ego-trip come free when you buy a ticket to chase the silver-box UX for your own product and its completely different userbase with entirely different needs and expectations?
IMHO Xfce4 has reached the level that now it does the Gnome 2 thing better than Gnome 2 did. (Just needs some tweaking, if you don't like the default blue theme.)
...
No, seriously, I think Gnome 1 had a lot over Gnome 2, and it amuses me to no end that people prefer Gnome 2 over Gnome 3.
If you like Gnome, great. If you don't like Gnome, you should use something else. Arguing this old subject hasn't yet accomplished anything, and there are plenty of alternatives available now. (I really like KDE4.)
If project developers are genuinely screwing their pooch, then a stampede to alternatives will convince them far more thoroughly than even the most well-crafted internet argument. If there's no stampede, then people are just arguing personal preferences in the face of popular preferences, and they'd still be better off switching to something else.
Save passionate arguing for situations in which it can do some good.
The problem is that a lot of people liked Gnome2 but dislike Gnome3. They feel betrayed because the Gnome team killed their favorite desktop environment on a whim, and that sort of thing isn't supposed to happen with open source.
Due to Gnome 2 / 3 name conflicts maintaining Gnome 2 is fairly difficult.
Basically the Gnome devs wanted to go in a new direction and are abusing their powers to kill off the old product. Users have legitimate reason to to upset.
Next step is of course to find understanding that users' reactions are based on numerous reasons, rather than originating from one source. Losing access to features previously found is one cause, but so is the lack of rational and balanced discussions explaining why the features were removed, and missing instructions on how to get similar functionality in Gnome 3, or the lack of tools to migrate old Gnome 2 applications to Gnome 3. To take a comparing example of Gnome2->Gnome3, lets look at Python 2->Python 3 and see what the Python Software Foundation did right.
#1: Features removed were announced years before they were removed, with clear instructions on how to migrate to better and improved features.
#2: 2to3 was invented, an automatic translator for source code from Python 2 to Python 3, to make it easy for developers to migrate over to new version.
#3: Any feature that was removed had clear documentation and discussion that explained why it was removed, and what users could do to move forward.
#4: New features were back-ported from Python 3 and made available in Python 2. This allowed users to test out things from the security and familiarity of Python 2, without getting tangled in all the changes at once in Python 3.
#5: Python 2 and Python 3 was/is developed in parallel, giving people plenty of glimpses (and warnings) of the future, and insight over what would be future safe activities.
Gnome 3 did none of these things. One could argue that there were practical reasons why, but not doing any of those things will hurt a project. At any rate, I have not seen Gnome 3 give any practical reasons why they did such an abrupt move from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3, beyond that they "had to".
(Written by a Gnome 3 user, on Gnome 3)
If they had created a new product instead of bumping Gnome's version number all these problems would have gone away because the user's expectation is to have something different instead of an evolution of an existing product.
They're trying to build a better product, and they're only a bunch of part-time volunteers.
At some point they had a bunch of features, but to keep up with the other desktops (Aero, Quartz) they had to focus on rearchitecting and, being a small team, there haven't enough manpower to keep all the features.
I also don't think language (api's) are not at all comparable to desktop environments. There's just so much going on in a desktop environment.
I thought quite a few of them worked for Redhat?
>> At some point they had a bunch of features, but to keep up with the other desktops (Aero, Quartz) they had to focus on rearchitecting and, being a small team, there haven't enough manpower to keep all the features.
That seems a bit of a rosy view of what happened. A cynic might say that they decided to scrap everything and start again, users be damned, and went out of their way to make 3/Shell incompatible with 2 to force people away from it, announcing that it was now abandoned and of no further interest. Then, as now, they explained how everyone that didn't like that move was wrong and stupid, and they set about making the desktop experience that you will absolutely love because we say so and if you don't do it our way you're a curmudgeon and intellectually subnormal.
and not only this cynic would be wrong, but he would also be full of crap, because it's such a trivial thing to check in the public repositories, public mailing list archives, and public bug tracking system.
but, obviously, crapping on a bunch of volunteers trying to work on the project they like is easier.
Are you saying they didn't force incompatibility with Gnome 2? Or that they didn't just decide to change everything to exactly how they wanted the desktop, regardless of users?
Maybe they didn't scrap some of the underlying libraries, but the whole look, layout, interaction pattern/user flow and pretty much everything else was a total change.
Ironically, the Redhat-employed ones seem to be working on Classic mode (so they can release RHEL 7 someday), which minimizes the damage the non-Redhat-employed ones have done: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Red-Hat-Linux-7-Will-Have-a-T...
How much time that is spent on packaging, documenting existing features, building communication systems, and doing cool new features is indeed hard resource questions for a project manager. Then there is policy questions which effect resources.
Python demands PEPs to be written before changes is considered. That demand for PEPs is less a resource question, and more a policy question. It forces developer to write down in words what they try to accomplish with a change, and also write down what effect it has on users.
In my opinion, the community reaction to gnome3 is not very surprising. Its a result of "less restrictive" developer process and few efforts into mitigation of community outrage. I can only hope they will find some insight from other projects, and start to handle feature changes with more user awareness.
Instead he's satisfied having de-constructed users' reactions, and just leaves it at that. It's like saying I figured out _why_ punching you in the face will make you upset, so I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the show.
Or the up button in Nautilus. Or any one of the dozens of useful things they removed. I was quite a fan of Gnome 2.x, but the "remove features people use because we are right and they are wrong" mentality means I switched back to Windows, and run VirtualBix for my coding, debugging, etc.
I really don't understand the "do not let people customise anything" attitude. I agree that supporting users who have made customisations is annoying and hard; just force people to return to a default config before they make any support requests. I agree that sane defaults are nice, and that option screens are ugly; offer sane defaults, and hide all the config stuff in a text file.
Heck, Opera wasn't even going to add in normal bookmarking until they received a huge community backlash against it. Many of us have hundreds of bookmarks and the alternative they were providing[1] would have made it a burden to find anything useful when one has more than a few dozen bookmarks.
In short, removing features makes people unhappy when they rely on them being there in order to be productive. Adding new features or dramatically altering the way long time ones work, sure go ahead, as long as current users are given the option to keep using those long time features (ones more than a few years old) the same way they expect by undoing some option in settings. Some might scoff at this as being impossible, but that was how Opera actually functioned from the beginning up until the switchover to Chromium in Opera 15.
[1] http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2013/07/08/shop-smarter...
It perfectly fits my use case (running a few apps fully maximised) and gets out of my way. Also, it is rock solid and has never crashed on me.
One of the main causes behind the bashing is that a perfectly stable Gnome 2 (which was a more mainstream/"full featured" WM) was butchered to create something which took out a lot of functionality people _actually_ use.
Obviously your use case, being a much simpler subset of what people typically do with their WMs, would fit in with most of the WMs so maybe the hoopla surprises you.
Normally when you make a products you decide the features and when those are stable, they are set in stone trough out the history of that whole/stable version. If the Gnome team was serious about their product in anyway they would not even pretend to have a stable product, but kept 2x as the stable release until the whole feature set was coherent between all applications.