GNOME: Possible Recovery Strategies 432
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."
Not just Gnome (Score:5, Insightful)
The one strategy that GNOME has never tried is asking users what
Almost all software has that problem.
Revert back to what worked (Score:4, Insightful)
GNOME 2 wasn't broken when ivory tower developers decided to fix it.
Why not spend development resources optimizing accelerated graphics performance and squashing bugs?
Don't screw up the perfectly fine UI because you have nothing else to do. (GNOME 3)
Don't bloat the whole DE beyond belief and require users run multiple heavy daemons with a questionable approach to privacy. (KDE)
Don't be an incomplete and lacking project borne of frustration with other ones. (Xfce)
Hubris (Score:2, Insightful)
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^W contradictory (fixed) ideas supported by usually inconclusive studies that could be mustered to support almost any design.
And thus we are also stuck with Metro^W "The Interface That Dare Not Speak Its Name."
Gnome's insistence on "the one true way" sound so much like the justifying of putting a touch interface on a desktop operating system I've been hearing for months. "LOOK AT THE HEAT MAP!!!#$!@#$ONE!"
Fuck heat maps. Ask the users what they want. The only reason why Jobs got away with what he got away with at Apple and being the sole final arbiter of what what went into an Apple device was that he actually understood what people wanted. That's a rare talent that people think they have but don't. The rest of us have to ask.
--
BMO
Re:Revert back to what worked (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Oh really? (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean by fixing the standard issue list of complaints and noticing that linux nerds are NOT using their computers like large cellphones, would reduce almost 90% of complaints?
What took you so fucking long Sherlock?
Will I return to gnome even if they do what they say? I dunno ... On one hand I do like spiffy new UI's, on the other hand I dont like wasting CPU and GPU power on dumb shit like windows and special effects I never pay attention to.
Re:Not just Gnome (Score:4, Insightful)
In that analogy, trying to put a tablet UI on a PC desktop environment would be like trying to put a steering wheel on a horse.
Re:Extensions (Score:3, Insightful)
The requested functions are already mostly available via gnome shell extensions, allowing users to customize gnome to their preference.
And this is where they fail. No one wants to program a fucking extension for every little bit of "useful" feature that should be there right out of the box so to speak. And that by virtue of being an extension could go away anytime. It's the same disease that affects the Firefox developers. Until this simple concept is hammered inside the gnome-tards thick skulls the project will remain a big fail.
Any recovery strategy starts with "We're sorry." (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:Not just Gnome (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure it does. KDE (which is really quite good). Cinnamon (a fork of Gnome 3), Mate (Gnome 2) and possibly XFCE or LXDE.
Re:Staying with gnome2 (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenSource economics are different from commercial ones. The end goal is offering something unique that will appeal to a set of users. The fact that you can install a DE from many providers means people who prefer traditional desktops can turn to LXDE/XFCE, if you want eye-candy and "paradigm" buzzwords, you can use KDE/GNOME, you prefer a tiling desktop, install AwesomeWM, etc...
My point is, the end goal is to fill the niche, GNOME3 try to fill them all and failed to find it's sweet spot...
Re:Not just Gnome (Score:5, Insightful)
> Writing software is not "art".
Sorry, you're wrong. Yes, there is a lot of science in Computer Science, but since this topic is about UI -- as soon as you start interacting with users, there are times when it is OK to break the UI rules. The *hard* part is knowing when to be consistent, and when not to. People, nor how they interact with computers does NOT always fit in a nice little black-n-white box that naive programmers love to think.
And just to be pedantic, here is real-world example: (Since /. is a POS for code formatting, replace the _ with spaces...)
The most important thing for writing code is: proper variable names, whitespace to align common idioms
function SwapInt32( x )
{
var n _= (x >> 24) & _____ 0xFF;
n |= (x >>_ 8) & ___ 0xFF00;
n |= (x <<_ 8) & __0xFF0000;
n |= (x << 24) & 0xFF000000;
return n;
}
Proper alignment makes it easier to read code. There are no hard and fast rules for whitespace.
> It's not there to be appealing.
Methinks
a) you missed the joy of optimizing code and coming up with a smaller and faster algorithm, nor
b) even grok the purpose of whitespace in the first place. Hint: Whitespace is NOT for the compiler's / interpreter's benefit but _humans_.
> the first step is convincing the customer that they don't know what they need,
Yes we understand your point that "No, the customer is not always right".
But riiiiight, like the customer is always some clueless schmoe. News flash, sometimes, they have been using software *longer* then your little code monkey shop has been in business for. While they may not know exactly what they want, it pays attention to try to understand their perspective and what are they *really* getting at. One of the best ways to learn how bad your UI is, is to give it to someone who does not have the same preconceived ideas that you automatically *assume* all your clients and other programmers have.
In the *real* world, *sometimes* client ARE knowledgable -- AND sometimes they are completely clueless. Your job as a programmer is to bridge that gap, and learn to get at what they are *really* wanting.
If you think programming is black-n-white you obviously haven't been doing it very long, or you suck at it.
Re:"Find new niches" (Score:5, Insightful)
Because starting with Gnome3, they decided their target audience is tablet/touchscreen users. There has not been, nor is there ever likely to be, hardware installed with Linux+Gnome3 out of the box. They decided to cater to an audience that does not exist.
Gnome3, Unity, and the UI-formerly-known-as-Metro all suck donkey balls, assuming you don't believe the few users who have completely adapted their usage patterns and workflows, after much effort, for minimal gains. Any perceived simplicity is actually just more complexity hidden beneath the surface.
And this is all beside the fact that touch UIs are innately less capable than the traditional keyboard+pointer paradigm.
Re:Not just Gnome (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Extensions (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Staying with gnome2 (Score:5, Insightful)
Because 3 sucks and they don't listen to real users. Theory ain't the same as practice, in practice.
The largest screwup was not by GNOME but by distributions in my opinion.
They abandoned GNOME3 for GNOME2 after it was released, not bothering to offer both choices. Some like Gentoo do provide the choice, for bleeding-edge distros like Fedora I understand that they went with the newest. But user-distros shouldn't have gone for GNOME3 only, and there is no technical reason to not offer both.
I think GNOME wants to build a interface for users and not for developers, which is why the slashdot community is a bit pissed (not being the target audience, complaints about "dumbing down".
KDE is elaborate and clunky; XFCE is a good tradeoff; more minimal WM are just toys for having multiple terminals. The choices offered to users by distributions was better a few years ago.
Gnome 3 is not the only thing that is sux (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the attitude of the Gnome developers
They are too arrogant
As TFA also has pointed out - they _never_ even bother to listen to the users - as if they (the developers) are "higher grade human beings" while we users are made of "lower grade materials"
That's what really sux
The "sux-ness" of Gnome 3 is but a by-product of the arrogance of the Gnome developers
Re:Not just Gnome (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, Bob and the Paperclip DO count. It's absurd not to count them (even though I personally never hated the paperclip with any fervor, the general verdict in in). And the pervasive awfulness of Windows Me. And the hopeless morass of Windows Vista. And the garbage heap that is Windows 8. You can't just excuse away their continual stream of massive goofs.
On the other hand, open source works, you anonymous idiot. So Gnome lays an egg; so what? It doesn't automatically make linux stink, because there is a wealth of lines of development going on, not like the walled garden of closed source. Just switch to Xfce for god's sake. If Xfce and half a dozen other alternate solutions were not already there, SOMEBODY WOULD START THEM. Because they COULD.
Re:Staying with gnome2 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Not just Gnome (Score:5, Insightful)
> One of the best ways to learn how bad your UI is, is to give it to someone who does not have the same preconceived ideas that you automatically *assume* all your clients and other programmers have.
Another thing I have suggested for ANYONE writing software -- whether FOSS or proprietary -- is to hand your software package to an end user. Then go sit in another room and watch them through a window. You can't help them or give them tips. Watch whether they struggle with it.
I've done this myself and 15 minutes watching a real, live, end user is more profitable than anything I can think of. Speaking from experience, the first thing you'll likely discover is that there are libraries on your development machine that aren't on the end user's, and you forgot to include them in the package (even if only as listed dependencies for the package manager). But once you get it installed, you sit back and watch. Look at their frustration as they try to figure out which menu items to click to do what they want.
More often than not (I've seen this, too, unfortunately) is they'll just give up and go back to what they're used to. If they can't easily navigate around your Brand New Thing(tm), they're going to blow it off.
I think that if everyone who developed software would do this simple bit of research, it would be a much happier world. :)
Thoughts from a core GNOME 1.x and 2.x developer (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm an old core GNOME developer, around for the 1.4 - 2.x days. I haven't been involved in GNOME 3, but I think they're on to some really cool things, even if there are serious problems now. These flamewars make me sad.
Many (most) of these comments remind me of the same slashdot.org discussions between GNOME 1.x and GNOME 2... I should remember; I was one of the core GNOME 2 devs who was flamed to hell.
Now people are talking like GNOME 2 was some sort of epitome of Linux desktops, and couldn't-we-just-stick-to-that-pretty-please. It also reminded me of the flack that KDE 3 developers took. Talk about whiplash. I don't think many people comparing GNOME 1.4 to GNOME 2.32 would prefer the former, and yet, to hear the cries on slahdot at the time, GNOME 2.x was doomed and nobody used it, and nobody would ever use it. Dooooooooomed. Doooooooooomed I say.... because we were all such complete idiots that we couldn't tie our shoelaces without shitting our pants. ;-)
I notice two things:
1) Free software desktops are often a little half-baked between major UI revisions. This does suck, but I think its a outcome of volunteer hackers... sometimes its hard to wait long enough to add all the features people like and miss before doing a major rev. Frankly, an effect you often see is a decrease in hacking if a project goes too long without a release (makes sense psychologically, right? sort of related to delayed gratification....).
For example: GNOME 2.0 was stinky. People flamed the hell out of us (in many ways, rightfully, it was half-baked), and not JUST about our current state, but speculatively that this represented some insane mis-step for the project. Instead of imagining what the negative-changes could allow in the future, they pretended like we were retarded, and driving the ship as fast as possible straight to hell. No benefit of the doubt. Now I don't want to apologize for this, I think free software should be held to the high quality standards of commercial software, but I mention this because its important context to the sort of panic-reaction people are displaying, assuming GNOME 3.0 betrays some fundamentally flawed direction rather than viewing it as "released too early, too half-baked, before certain necessary things happened".
By GNOME 2.6 it was pretty awesome. By GNOME 2.12 pretty much everyone just shut the fuck up. A number of users found GNOME 1.x more to their liking and moved on to other desktops, but we picked up Waaaaaaaaaaaaay more users than we lost. Today, I think most people would cringe if they had to use GNOME 1.4 instead of GNOME 2.12 (or whatever).
So: GIVE GNOME3 SOME TIME, and view GNOME releases with a fresh eye. GNOME 3.8 might rock your world, and the 6-mo release cycle means changes happen faster.
2) I think if you asked the average slashdot reader, they would like to think they are more "open to change" than the average citizen. In fact, I find the entire *nix culture extremely resistant to change, automatically viewing change they don't understand as "change for change's sake". In a way, its sort of unique and cool.... most of the western world is swept up in a progressivist notion of time, always viewing the future as "better" than the best. In contrast, *nix culture often has a distinct note of Indian-style views of time: the gods used to walk the earth, and since then, its mostly been decay. The downside is that its not a very fun community to develop UIs for: instead of focusing on "what's gained", people pull out flamethrowers immediately at the slightest hint of something being lost. CHANGE USUALLY REQUIRES LOSS because DESIGN IS BALANCE. Sometimes the balance is wrong, and sometimes tradeoffs are made when they needn't have been. I think just like GNOME 1.x to GNOME 2, sometimes the first-couple-passes you lose more than you needed to, and this gets balanced out over time.
As a bystander to GNOME 3, I see many ways they could achieve their goals while minimizing the (very real) losses hackers are experiencing whe
Re:Not just Gnome (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with today's software is that these aesthetics are taking more precedence than functionality and usability. for example, gnome 3's window management makes egregious assumptions about what I want my windows to do. Just because I move a window to a certain spot doesn't mean I want it radically resized. Something reasonable would be snap-to-grid or to-edge, which is nice, WITH an option to disable it if it causes a problem.
There is a reason for such hatred, and that reason is likely embedded in the workflow assumed by the software. Today's modern UIs are rife with this sort of thing..the looks matter more than the workflow, the latter being designed for mouth breathing idiots. I realize this is a necessity for input limited devices like tablets, but it does not belong on workstations. These 'designers' know this, but they'd rather cash in on stupid fads and hot trends than develop good software, or in the case of gnome devs, brownnose apple.
The problem with facebook and other web 2.0 'applications' is that the browser was never designed to handle the sort of contexts you're referring to. Money and control freakery drive 'web apps,' not good design, aesthetics, or user interest. Use proper tools for the job, in this case, a real IM client.
Re:Staying with gnome2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Gnome3 is garbage unless you have a tablet. It's a tablet UI, designed without considering that most people who run Gnome do not use a tablet. It's not exactly elegant even compared to other tablet UIs, but it's better than Gnome2 in that respect. However, as I said, people don't really use Gnome (ANY Gnome) on their tablets.
If you're happy with it, great. It's clear that most people aren't, and no matter how much you insist they are stupid for disliking something THAT IS COMPLETELY SUBJECTIVE they won't use it.
Re:Staying with gnome2 (Score:2, Insightful)
Or you can try actually learning the new system - it really is better. I personally do not want to go back to the days of GNOME 2 or Windows XP. Have you actually tried it for any meaningful lenght of time? I mean seriously. You can get to all of your regular applications with a gesture to the left of the screen and a click. Another gesture gets you into a list of all of applications that you can then filter. Switching desktops is also trivial. Move forward, not back.
People put a lot of time into engineering and designing GNOME3 to be an elegant desktop solution that works great. What they did not account for was pig headed, stubborn, unwilling to learn users who wanted their knock-off of Windows XP back. Microsoft is going through this same backlash now for innovating with Windows 8. Same thing - you can now get to almost everything in a click - seemless UI. How do people react? "Give merh mah AXE PEE back!!!".
Seriously, people suck. I am grateful for both the GNOME and Microsoft people actually trying to innovate in the desktop area.
I see we have gnome dev here.
just because we can get to all of the programs does not mean anything i can get all of them through a terminal as well. it is only moving forward if it is better.
Gnome three may look elegant and may be useful on tablet but it is not used there. It is used on desktops. Just because lots of time was put into engineering it does not make it good. Users in the case of linux desktop are not gibbering morons or merely stubborn they have brains and know a thing or to about the computers they are using . Seamless is not the same as powerful. simple is. gnome three is not simple.
Re:Thoughts from a core GNOME 1.x and 2.x develope (Score:3, Insightful)
The core of the problem is that GNOME developers have the habit of releasing as 2.0 or 3.0 something, which is of beta quality at best. It's quite possible that GNOME 3 contains some great ideas, but trying to attract users to software, which will need a year or two more to reach usability of the previous version, is not going to win anybody's sympathies. Exactly this has already happened with the release of GNOME 2.0: its usability was nowhere near that of GNOME 1.x, but still, it was presented as a replacement of 1.x. The users were rightfully complaining. One would have hoped that GNOME developers have learned something from that fiasco...
As of culture resistant to changes: For most people, the computer is a tool. And as with many complex tools, it takes time (sometimes years) to learn how to use them in the most efficient way. The learned experience is very valuable, but a part of it is necessarily lost when the tool suddenly starts behaving differently (people are not used to their screwdrivers changing shape overnight). Sure, changes are necessary for progress, but you should not ignore that changes come with a high cost to the users and radical changes of basic concepts even more so. Changing details is usually fine, removing functionality is worse, and radical changes of established products should be done only in cases, where the benefit is an order of magnitude larger than the loss. GNOME developers seem to ignore this fact of life for years.
Re:Extensions (Score:5, Insightful)
What the fuck is a static workspaces extension?
Fucking shit the last time I had to grab tinyturdware in order to have a useable GUI, it was before Win95. Now I need a list of downloadable crap that ONLY EXISTS BECAUSE THE BASELINE SUCKS ASS, and I don't even know the list. Maybe there's something to browse?
Whatever, fuck it, and if you defend it, fuck you too. The sheer attitude of the devs is so hard to explain. It's like, they build it for some lowest common denominator that doesn't even exist, and then if you don't like that you must be some kind of problem case so go get a dumb extension? I guess it's good that they have those now, when I left that GUI they sure as shit didn't, they just had a bunch of goddamned attitude.
Fuck it. Just fuck it. GNOME is a lost fucking cause until it gets forked by devs that don't have their heads so far up their asses that they are topologically equivalent to a fucking klein bottle.
Re:Gnome 3 is not the only thing that is sux (Score:4, Insightful)
I was under the impression that Gnome3 worked exactly as designed. it's just that their guidelines were either SHIT or interpreted wrongly, which is the same as being shit really.
if they want to work on movie interfaces(tm) then they can, just shouldn't expect people to use it and to donate time/money for it.. they had experts who came up with shit, that's pretty much the whole story.
it seems they've eating up the no distractions mantra to the level that it's a distraction("users are idiots"), like a bad boss.
Re:Staying with gnome2 (Score:5, Insightful)
I also blame MS, but not for the ribbon (that's just a symptom of a greater underlying disease). The reason MS has dumped the start menu - because their usability labs have decided that users don;t actually use it, 90% of users preferring to stick icons on the desktop (you've seen them) or pinned to the taskbar.
Now while that is undoubtedly true, and shows that quick-access to often-used programs is a very important feature, it forgets to note that people still use the start menu for all apps that are not quick-launched. But, hey, that doesn't matter, the last 10% of user activity can be sacrificed in the name of statistical user input.
Same with the ribbon - its basically a quick-launch menu, only forgetting about the bits you do not use often.
It seems Gnome has the same problem, focussing on a flawed assumption that if a user doesn't use something all the time, then they don't use it at all.
Re:They won't listen anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy crap:
A lot of reasons people have been using this view are due to the other two views sucking for various reasons ... The role for compact view is unclear. Our research suggests that it is something like: the only view that works for browsing a lot of files at once. This is really hard to reconcile with providing good defaults that just work and having consistency with the file chooser.
So you admit people are using the view, it works best for browsing lots of files, and somehow, this means the reason for existence is unclear somehow so you should delete it because you don't use it yourself?
Meanwhile, they try to circle the wagons and discuss what to do to address an issue of dwindling support:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE0ODg [phoronix.com]
Their conclusion including how to address brain drain and exodus of users? *MORE* Gnome 3, stop thinking about the desktop paradigm as much and make it more different, and Gnome hasn't taken over *enough* and needs to be its own OS.
Oh well, guess GNOME will descend into oblivion. They had some neat aspects in Gnome 3, but it's just so hard to deal with some of the intended design choces that they clearly have no intention of revisiting.