James Hawkins wrote:
encourage peer review. We value bug reports, comments, suggestions,
and criticisms, whether good or bad, so that we can make wine a better
application. Your comments infer that the developers aren't
interested in making wine easier for the end user, or that we are too
'hardcore' to realize that wine may be hard to use. The latter is
possible, but the former is completely untrue. We take usability
reports very seriously, and increasing usability is a top priority.
I do think that often developers are so technical minded that things
that seem obvious to them are definitely not obvious to the average
user. I peek at the KDE usability mailing list sometimes, a project more
obviously focused on usability, and they can be just as terrible about
it :) I didn't mean to rag on the wine developers, it's just that up to
this point I don't think usability is an area of wine that has had a lot
of work done on it. I'm not saying you wouldn't respond to usability
complaints, but I think it should be apparent that in its current state
wine would suffer from a low usability score.
The only problem is that we don't get those types of reports as often
as we should. One reason why we don't get these reports is because
users have winetools to make wine easier. They don't run wine
directly, configure wine with winecfg, and stumble over any usability
issues. That is why this issue began in the first place.
This is true to some extent but I don't think wine is to the point yet
where you could get meaningful usability reports from users. I think
wine developers can quite easily on their own apply the "does the user
have to open a terminal to use and configure wine" litmus test. To do
usability testing you have to have an interface that the usability of
can be tested. Wine has winecfg, but the average user can't even get to
that interface to test it.
Speaking specifically to you Joseph, I've checked through the
wine-devel and wine-users mailing list archives for reports of
usability issues from you, but this is the first one. The
constructive thing to do would be to politely report your problems on
the wine-devel list, or even file bug reports for them.
Well I hadn't really thought a lot about wine usability until this came
up on the list =) I think I will.
On at least KDE and Gnome, alt-f2 will bring up a run dialog, type
winecfg and press enter. Even if winecfg was only usable from the
command line, that doesn't count against usability. If that were the
case, many well-known command line applications would be considered to
have poor usability.
Many command line applications /do/ suffer from poor usability. I would
never expect the average user to make use of them. Each command has its
own fairly arbitrary single letter shorthands for a variety of switches,
with no consistency between command line apps. Even to have a command go
recursively through a directory isn't consistent, sometimes it's -r
other times -R. I don't consider the command line to be usable by the
average user at all. Having to type "man command" and read through
several pages of documentation before being able to perform simple
actions doesn't qualify as intuitive. That said, the command line is
very useful and powerful -- for power users.
and you can launch a wine application that asks the user what windows
app they would like to run or make shortcut to so they don't have to use
terminal there either, /then/ maybe there can be some usability discussion.
winefile
I don't think winefile does what I described.
And then maybe it would be appropriate to remove winetools.
Please re-read the posts. No one is advocating removing winetools,
only the link to the winetool's download from winehq.org.
Err, that's what I meant. I was unclear, sorry.
Again, I don't mean to insult anyone. I think wine is progressing at a
breakneck pace and that it's an awesome piece of software. But I think
removing winetools, a utility that helps to compensate for a current
lack of wine usability, maybe unwise until wine can adequately replace
it. I would at least set this criteria:
-.Desktop files for winecfg in all binary packages
Because without that I don't think removing winetools will cause an
increase in usability feedback.
