Le jeudi 26 juillet 2007 à 10:54 +0200, Wouter Verhelst a écrit : > One thing I do not like about the GNOME usability philosophy is > precisely this: catering for the novice user is great, but the GNOME > usability philosophy caters for novice users *at the expense of > experienced users*.
This widespread belief is entirely untrue. It is all about making things understandable for the novice user without reducing functionality for experienced users; that doesn't mean removing functionality, but rather removing the *need* for some functionality or configurability. Many Unix users are used to a high level of configurability, and it is definitely frustrating not to encounter it when you are used to. But in the end I find myself gaining a lot of time, because the only things that are shown in the interface are the things I actually need. > If you want to do that in GNOME, go ahead, be my > guest; I couldn't care less anyway. And in fact, I installed GNOME on my > parent's machine, since I don't want to have to repeatedly explain them > too much, so your philosophy has some uses. But please don't expand that > philosophy to the rest of the Debian system, where it is totally > useless. I have no business into changing other environments' menus. This is why I suggested that we keep the Debian menu as it is for those who prefer it. As people seem to want to switch to the freedesktop menu given its superiority, I only want to ensure the GNOME menu is improved by the process rather than being turned into garbage. > I'll agree that some things could be finetuned, and that some things > simply don't belong in the menu system. But these things are exceptions, > and I think most of the applications that are in the menu system > currently do belong there. > > Speaking of "modifying the interface", one reason why I think the GNOME > people have the idea that nobody ever modifies their interface is that > it is simply too hard to modify the interface in GNOME. I don't think anyone claimed that nobody does modify their interface. The problem is that the very idea of modifying it is not intuitive. > Adding an icon > to the panel or the desktop should be a drag-and-drop operation. It is. > Changing the desktop background should not require me to add the > image to a list of background images first before I can pick it from > that list. Whoa? The background properties capplet features a button that spawns a file chooser in which you can choose a picture and get done with it. And that's for the complicated way; otherwise it's just a matter of right-clicking on the picture in epiphany and selecting "use as background". > These are useless hoops to jump through; and even Windows has > been doing this correctly for about 10 years. Talking about Windows in a thread about menus sounds... well, no comment. -- .''`. : :' : We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code. `. `' We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to `- our own. Resistance is futile.
