On 04/29/11 23:40, Bilal Akhtar wrote:
Why GNOME3 didn't make it to 11.04 is a different story. There are a handful of Ubuntu Desktop developers who had to focus on Unity work. It would be difficult for Unity to be made on then-unstable GNOME3 libraries and it would have been equally difficult for Desktop developers to focus on both unity and GNOME3. Hence the decision was made, to put up GNOME3 packages in a PPA for testers and ship Unity on top of GNOME2. The GNOME3 transitions were postponed to 11.10, when all GNOME3 packages would be in the official repos and Unity will also run on GNOME3.
Thanks, that actually helps. Slashdot and other media are running with "Ubuntu has completely ejected GNOME3 and is splitting from GNOME" and all.
But all I got from this is "shipping an unfinished product to get testing in before it's ready; will fix in next release."
By the way, you will continuously be chasing the "non-technical users" for all time, as each attempt to make well-designed and sensible things "easy to understand" for people who can't get their brains around an interface that makes logical sense (people have a lot of ideas about how things work that are based on complete and total idiocy and glaring logical disconnects) will just make the stupid people progressively stupider. Interfaces for non-technical people should be non-*technical*; that doesn't mean there isn't a learning curve. You should see what I'm going through right now *learning to ride a bike*, I'm seriously considering classes.
It seems to me that gnome-shell was designed for people who tend to group and categorize things, rather than people who just want something to happen by some magic and don't particularly have a high enough level of brain activity to keep track of more than one thing at a time. You know the type, the ones that close the word processor before opening "The Internet" because once they have 3 or 4 programs running they can't remember what they were doing with them anyway, and have to repeatedly dig through the task bar and figure out what order the tabs are in (rather than remembering where they were a moment ago and reflexively switching around). This is also a developed skill, not an inherent property of human thought; notably, it is a USEFUL skill.
I guess the reason Unity takes the smart phone approach of non-differentiation between an application launcher and the application instance (i.e. the button to launch is the button to access the existing window as well; whether the application is running yet or not is not a concern, you do the same thing to get to it) is because people are inherently bad at instantiation. There is no way you can ever grab a copy of a comb; there is only one comb. I suppose someone could find it inobvious that you can run a program multiple times at once, figuring that once you run it it is "in use" and you can't run it again.
... until they get 3 file browser windows, or multiple windows in their e-mail application, or their Web browser, or whatnot. Then it immediately becomes intuitive that you can run the same program multiple times (even if you really can't, for whatever reason), and that the "program" and the "window" are two different things.
I'm a strange one, if you end up talking to me. I am inherently against oversimplifying things; but stuff has to be sensible and as simple as reasonably possible. To me there is a balance in everything, and it has to be done "right". I dislike both communism and capitalism; I dislike all extreme (liberal/conservative) political views; I wind up taking both sides in most theoretical/philosophical arguments, but pulling towards the center.
But I do get irritated by things. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
