GNOME Ignoring its Own Users? 735
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."
For those just joining the discussion (Score:5, Informative)
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 [musichall.cz]
This has been happening for a while (Score:3, Informative)
Environments vs. Simple WIndow managers (Score:3, Informative)
I digress, the above is a slightly different rant. Not all user stuff is bad. I have sent MANY suggestions to the ROX team, and they have all made it into the software. ROX now depends on the stuff ranted about in the first paragraph, however :(
Before the flaming starts (Score:2, Informative)
I think the problem is not that the devs don't care about what the users want, but that there today is no working infrastracture making it possible for the users to give feedback to the developers in a meaningful (for the developers) way.
Anyway, before the flaming starts, read the relevant mailing list thread here:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-dev
(roadmap status update/update request)
and you might get an idea why some developers didn't react to kind to Eugenias contributions. (To put it short, she acts incredibly annoying)
Re:For those just joining the discussion (Score:3, Informative)
Sure [gnome.org] ? [gnome.org]
Join GnomeLove, it will help all (Score:1, Informative)
GnomeLove [gnome.org]
Re:For those just joining the discussion (Score:5, Informative)
The answers varied, but seemed to center on "no, we have bugzilla" and "if you want to do that with bugzilla, create a special query page for devs to review feature requests."
This sounds like reasonable advice to me....
The grand secret of spatial nautilus (Score:4, Informative)
1. Create a "places" folder weher you drag shortcuts to your favourite folders (you know, the usual: mp3, pr0n, work, school). ctrl+shift+drag = create shortcut (symlink). Put the "places" folder on desktop & toolbar.
2. Press ctrl+q to "kill all windows" when you've done whatever you were trying to do w/ file manager.
Yeah, it still doesn't approach the glory that is Konqueror but it's not worse than "browse" mode of Nautilus either.
Re:Join GnomeLove, it will help all (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:1, Informative)
RTFA [expert-zone.com]! Eugenia did try to DO something about it. She may be the Dvorak of OSNews (I don't know or care), but even a broken clock shows the right time twice a day; IMHO, she nailed this one.
F/OSS must figure out how to add users to the feedback loop if they want to compete. Software nirvana = Free/Open Source + Inclusive/Meaningful User Feedback
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:5, Informative)
All of this information is in the second article.
Re:Fork Gnome! (Score:4, Informative)
Linus Torvalds has repeated stated "World Domination" as a goal of Linux based systems. There's a start for you.
Re:Before the flames begin... (Score:3, Informative)
How many people want to come home after work every day to emails from Gnome, telling them to do more coding they don't enjoy? Especially if those people have friends, families, or other concerns? What the article proposes is turning a hobby these people do for their own fulfillment into an unpaid job. How many programmers would the community lose?
Re:For those just joining the discussion (Score:4, Informative)
Jeff was certainly curt, and perhaps should have been gentler in making
the point, but he's probably right too. In his judgment (and mine too,
fwiw) that thread was doomed to produce very little impact, a lot of
noise.
Something GNOME enthusiasts on this list often seem to forget is that
its *not* just their time. When you send a message to a mailing list,
you are asking for everyone to spend some time on it. When you start a
thread that will draw lots of replies, you are, unwittingly or not,
asking for everyone on the list (including hackers) to spend lots of
time.
I define the GNOME enthusiast community as: those who are actively
involved with and interested in GNOME but have NOT contributed large
quantities of code, translation or documentation (there are several
exceptional cases, for example Jeff himself, but not a lot). We need
enthusiasts and should value them! It provides a source of excitement,
sociability, feedback on how we're doing in different areas, and
sometimes even new ideas.
But right now, the lists have become driven by the enthusiast community
to the extent that hackers have gone into hiding. A good thread on
desktop-devel-list *should* be predominantly (75% or more, say, as a
totally arbitrary number) posts by core GNOME hackers related to that
area. Look at a thread now.... probably 90% of the posts are by
enthusiasts. That's taking "being in touch with the community" a little
too far to the point that its hard to get work done
For example, most of the people actually writing code that will be in
the next GNOME release have probably been actively deleting every
message to this theme thread! Its not because they don't care, its
because they don't want to take the time away from working on gnome to
wade through all the noise. And they shouldn't have to.
Compared to its peak as a lively discourse among the hackers doing core
contributions to the gnome codebase, desktop-devel-list is almost a dead
list in terms of "useful things accomplished". Part of the problem is a
*very* high noise level, and also very annoying persistent threads of
the bike shed variety.
Something people only relatively recently involved in GNOME (last couple
years) wonder is about the relative silence / non-responsiveness of core
hackers. It seems like desktop-devel-list, despite all the traffic, has
very few people who are getting something done (see usability gnome org
for an even worse example of this that is even more my fault). That the
lists we (core hackers) used to haunt have become a tangle of weeds is
one of the major factors driving this.
As community leaders in GNOME, one of our jobs is to shepherd the lists
so they do not become exceedingly noisy (and scare away important hacker
to hacker traffic). But we have largely abdicated this responsibility in
the last couple years. markmc tried to fight the tide about a year ago,
but eventually gave up. Its hard *because* we're actually very nice
people, and thus none of us want to be the list nazi. But its also very
important to have this sort of pruning to be a healthy community.
We've been talking about this a lot lately in s33kret cabal discussions.
That we feel the need to have these private circles is part of the
problem! Nobody, even those of us involved in the cabal (and especially
not Jeff who is an outspoken supporter of openness and inclusion), want
this sort of private exclusionary construct.
So what's the point?
1) Desktop-devel-list, #gnome-hackers, etc have been drowned by a deluge
of well meaning (and healthy, when found in moderation) enthusiast
involvement.
2) The loss of effective communication channels has had a major negative
impact on the amount and p
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:1, Informative)
Parent poster hit it on the nose (Score:1, Informative)
Here's an incomplete list of examples from the very thread that spawned the article:
Havoc said:
"We [are interested in user feedback], but we have better ways to find out than web polls.
I'm interested in what your features are, because I like as much data as possible. But I'm not going to be surprised or think it reflects any
fundamental breakage in GNOME if nobody gets around to those features. There are only enough developers to implement maybe 1% of what gets
requested."
Federico stated:
"In general, field research would be more beneficial in the long run. Real users --- random people who go to Brazilian Telecentros, office clerks in European cities --- don't know where to report their annoyances with free software. They don't have time to find out about
it as they just want to get things done. You have to go to them, ask them, and watch them use the software."
Bastien said:
"I usually implement features when they are unintrusive, make the software easier to use, and when people ask nicely for them, without spamming or rambling on about them."
Shaun added:
"The problem with all these voting systems is that they have sample bias written all over them. The majority of users, real users, don't go onto bugzilla, and they don't vote in web polls on osnews. Market research is not the same thing as polling the enthusiast community...
And I *did* implement a voting system for Yelp features, but nobody voted"
A bit overblown (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Don't feed the troll (Score:3, Informative)
Developers' replies (Score:3, Informative)
planet.gnome.org [gnome.org] has a load of GNOME developers responding to the two articles in a far more logical and intelligent way than the articles deserve.
Somebody like Eugenia who runs such a badly-implemented news+comment site really shouldn't complain about GNOME not implementing features the users want.