The Live CD

I booted up the 2.14 live CD for the first time.

We still have that spelling mistake in one of the videos.

I broke the new search tool in Nautilus in under thirty seconds. This is the feature that was touted all over as being ‘fantastic’ and a real leap forwards. Sorry, it’s not.

Why do I always get the impression that coders only consider usability and documentation as an afterthought, something to be tagged on at the last minute?

Pseudobug #2: Waiting for Godot

Suppose your washing machine was broken. You call out the engineer. He says ‘Sure, we could fix it. But your kitchen floor’s uneven. We’ll wait until someone else fixes that.’

We’re doing this all the time.

Yes, perhaps it’s more productive and a better use of developer time to wait until library Foo is available, or some new standard is implemented. But in the meantime, users are having to put up with problems, and they’re watching us twiddle our thumbs over it.

When library Foo could be years away, we can’t keep putting things off.

Users matter. They’re who we exist for. Hurting the users to save developer time is not nice.

Meta-bug #1: Frank Sinatra

There’s not much as frustrating to a wannabe contributor to FOSS who’s filed a bug, as a response of WONTFIX and NOTABUG from a developer.

These aren’t bugs. They’re metabugs. There is no known fix.

Metabug #1 occurs when the developer believes he is Frank Sinatra. Other desktop environments and applications may have done something a particular way for decades, but the developer doesn’t care. He’s doing it His Way.

An example is double-click word select. Keep the mouse button held down, and you can extend the selection word by word, right? Firefox has this marked as a bug (and hence metabug #1 doesn’t apply here, but pseudobug #1 does: ‘Problem has been known since before the flood’, or in this case 1999), but some applications don’t even let you select anything after you’ve done this and don’t see this as a problem. You’ve selected a word? Good for you! You’re not selecting anything else with that, surely?

Coming of age

The time has come — it’s been coming for a while — when FOSS must decide what it is. Who is it for?

Slashdot was quite rough on our 2.14 release. Cue the usual misinformed rants about each version of GNOME removing features. One poster writes “Supposedly many options will confuse the user. Come on. These users are using Linux.”

Should FOSS never be for more than geeks?

The matter of GIMP recently reared its ugly head on NewsForge recently. And there, someone writes in comment:

And these demands that the developers do x or y, what’s that nonsense about, this is free open source software, you didn’t pay for it, you don’t write any documentation for it, but you want it the way you want it? Talk about childish. So yes, if you don’t like one of these projects, either don’t use it, or contribute to make it better. But please, this is not a commercial project, it’s made by volunteers. If photoshop has features you don’t like, and you paid hundreds of dollars for it, you have every right to complain and try to get adobe to fix it. But if someone gives you a present, which is what this kind of software is at its heart, why on earth do you think you have the right to question the quality of that present?

Well, I’m going to tell you that users have every right. We exist for them.
What is Linux? What is GNOME? If it’s just something we do for kicks, then sure, we can tell griping users to get lost. It’s our ball and we’re doing what we like with it.

But if we’re serious about providing an alternative to other operating systems, if we’re serious about providing choice and quality, then we have a duty, and we have to take it seriously.

Without users, we’re just a bunch of geeks indulging in mutual back-rubbbing. I am honoured to join the ranks of bloggers here at blogs.gnome.org, but take a second to look at the faces. What do you see? Pretty much nothing but 20-something geeks.

We have to look beyond our circle, and beyond our mindset. The command line is a burden on the memory and the fingers. Emacs and vi are bizarre and arcane forms of self-torture. Primary paste wastes more time (with mis-selection and mis-clicks of that mouse wheel) than it saves. GIMP was designed by monkeys on crack. Enough. Time to let go and move on.

When users tell us such a feature is too complex, or crazy, or the interface sucks, we have to take heed. When users clamour for something to be fixed, we have to listen and prioritize accordingly. If you still think you’re hacking for fun, you’re in the wrong place.

I think it’s time for us to grow up. Some kicking and screaming may be involved, and some egos bruised. Let’s get to work.

Manuals aren’t sexy

In the words of someone on #gnome-hackers, ‘Documentation isn’t sexy’. Well, dang. I joined the wrong project. #gnome-sex, anyone?

Documentation is never going to garner great accolades either. Nobody’s going to say ‘Hey, this piece of software has the best manual ever!’ It really only gets a mention if it’s pretty bad.

So it was nice to see the review of 2.14 on Linux.com mention the documentation, even if it was only as ‘the stuff that’s in Yelp’. Though they managed to spot our number one problem — ‘At times, the text in Yelp refers to older releases.’ — and they say we need polish. They’re not wrong.

I was pretty confident the docs team had tracked down and stamped out nearly every mention in the User Guide of features not seen since GNOME 2.6 (yeah, it was that bad), but there are the application manuals to consider too.

So still a lot of work to do on the documentation, and as I said, there’s a few rough patches in the User Guide. Those I intend to fix for 2.14.1.