On 2/21/07, Linus Torvalds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Would it be a bad idea to have a mode where you can't even do silly things
like that by mistake? Keep the core menu entry fixed, for example? No doubt. When it comes to making a mess of it, my daughter is better at _creating_ the mess than she is at straightening the end result out.
I often wished that there would be something like a reset to default or repair. (see also bug: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387947 ). One other thing people hate is that they I forced to decide whiuch desktop they end up (including myself). Isn't this the story (of at leats KDE and GNOME): GNOME was invented because KDE was actually not really free. Now both are. Now we have different toolkits and also different development strategies. But users use both desktops (and also many love XFCE). So a free desktop tends to be "dirty" in the sense that people switch back and forth and rarely use a clean desktop. And OTOH outside of Linux community really cares about all these desktops. But if one follows discussions and blogs one would think that these desktops are really of any importance (which they are not in the computer world, still). If a company or a local government switches to one of these desktops then this mostly because of the contacts they had and primarily decisions are based on some facts. Same is true for a single user. So our discussions are mostly of the base. There are some aspects of usability and coolness that users like. And some things they can not understand. I was a bit surprised to find out that in KDE you actually have to copy files in $HOME/.autostart to get applications started (standard Kubuntu). There seems to be a control center plugin that we did install but was actually not visible. I wonder if no KDE user ever wanted to have some applications started by default. I did not find any solutions on the net. Actually we were about to install workrave - maybe there is a simple way but that is absolutely not intuitive nur visible. Honestly in GNOME there is a solution but it is rather hidden as a tab in "Sessions". On these occasions one gets the impression that users and developers sometimes do not really communicate well. I have experienced this witht the epiphany browser where the adblock extension was not enabled by default for years (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364285) . This sure meant that you just could not use epiphany as a browser nowadays - well I could not. I dont want to browse through all the ads. It's interesting - because I really think that this has driven MANY users to Firefox and mabye this is one of the reasons that even the GNOME orientated distros prefer Firefox. I think that often its the small things that can be REALLY important for a user. epiphany had and has some great usability pros but also still some cons that are not resolved for years. And this is only one application. Maybe it would be good to maintain more flavors of a desktop or application - one which is pure and one which contains some dirty hacks but solve problems for the user. I think that the GNOME way is better in the very long run - but this means that one has to live with some cons for 10 years till there is a really clean solution. And that is not acceptable, even if it will be the better solution then. regards, Thilo -- Thilo Pfennig http://wiki.foresightlinux.com/confluence/display/~vinci/
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