On Mon, 10 Jan 2022 at 07:52, Sam Varshavchik <mr...@courier-mta.com> wrote:
> Joe Zeff writes: > > > On 1/8/22 9:03 PM, Robert Moskowitz wrote: > >> > >> One cute comment I saw that Xfce will have to be called 'E', as it is > no > >> longer 'fc' and once it jettisons X, well... > > > > Xfce hasn't stood for anything in particular for many years now. > > Which is precisely the reason why xfce is a breath of fresh air. It just > works. It does what a usable desktop should do: give me desktop icons; a > menu bar; a tray; a pager; and some dockable icons. That's it. > > Its profile is low enough not to attract interest from self-appointed UI > experts whose mission is to frak up and turn a usable desktop environment > into whatever they imagined while under the influence. > I don't think that is a realistic description of the effort that goes into DE designs. Linux developers have to have a target class of users in mind, and also try to make it easy for users to migrate from Apple and Microsoft DE's. Years ago at work, we had users whose primary system was Apple or Windows and needed to use software running on a mini-super. Our Xterminals were not popular with that group, so we introduced a few NeXT systems and found that both groups of users were happy to work with the NeXT systems. There is actually a lot of research behind Microsoft and Apple user interface designs, including focus groups and testing. In my field (remote sensing) I encounter users trained in agronomy or marine biology whose prior exposure to computing was their smart phone and game consoles. If you suggest they copy and paste the text of an error message into an online forum post, you get a screen capture. They have never encountered a terminal and many have difficulty filling in text boxes in GUI applications -- they want a pull-down menu where they can choose an item. One of the "mission critical" applications from NASA is a set of command-line programs that were developed on SGI IRIX64 and now run on linux and macOS. NASA added a capability for the application to dump an XML file with details of the command-line options and then used these to add a menu item with a section for each program to an existing Java application. The user fills in forms and the Java application constructs a command line which can be run locally on linux or passed to a remote server. This allows many users who would never get started if a command-line was the only way to run the programs. Once started, they want to run the same process on 100's to 1000's of files, and will be willing to make the step to batch processing. Many younger users learned Python in university and now do batch processing with a Python IDE. For many users, this fell apart when they were suddenly forced to work remotely after relying on using systems configured by others at their workplace. Many posts in this forum are seeking help with problems involving desktop configuration, which shows that there is a big gap between UI design and design for fixing broken systems. Many of the younger users will simply reinstall the OS and apps when something breaks. Apple and Microsoft both provide cloud storage that preserves user files and settings across installs, so for many users this actually works as long as you are willing to live with a basic configuration and minimal tweaks, but if the breakage is a reproducible bug they get stuck in an endless loop until Dr. Google leads them to the fix. -- George N. White III
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