After reading the 3.0 plan of the release-team I was curious what the end-users would say. It is rather difficult to find out because there is no average end-user. Anyway, I tried to summarize opinions from two popular german computer magazines:

  • Heise-online: The biggest computer magazine in Germany (online and offline). They feature a rather big and detailed article on GNOME 3.0.
  • Pro-Linux News: This is a non-profit Linux News site. Their article is smaller and the Nerd-factor of the readers is certainly a bit higher here.

Apart from some more off-topic posts (GNOME vs. KDE, MacOS is the only real thing, etc.) on the Pro-Linux board the reactions were quite similar with those main points:

  1. Don’t make it a KDE 4.0! People rely on a stable desktop…
  2. This looks interesting and cool! GNOME really needed some revamp…
  3. Hmm, I cannot see why this is better than now – do we need it?

The rest of the comments are mostly based on misunderstandings (heise writes that “Zeitgeinst” will replace Nautilus which is simply untrue). Funny enough though, quite a lot of people comment that they liked our little steps in 2.x a lot which most sums up with point 1. These was much less critism than I expected actually and instead people applaud us for the work in the past years.

Of course this is no representative review about user comments, it is just a small limited summary (only German, people who are really interested in computing). In the end I think we seem to do well, but should mind the three points raised: Make it stable, make it cool, make it useful!

4 Responses to “3.0 – what our users think”

  1. Kiyoshi Aman Says:

    I’m by no means an ordinary user, but I was expecting to see something about desktop-wide integration via dbus so as to make it easier to integrate various components and therefore make the system as a whole better.

    (Then again, I’d also like to see Evolution go away in favour of “just an email client”, “just a contacts manager”, etc.)

  2. Simon Says:

    The first point seems to be the most common one I see from actual Gnome users, which is understandable – KDE4 was a big step forward, but also a very disruptive one, both for users and for developers.

    Fortunately, what I’ve read so far on the Gnome 3 plans are fairly reassuring, in that much of it seems to remain evolutionary in nature – old APIs are being deprecated and removed, but code targeting current Gnome should continue to work with 3.0. So once released, it should be a lot more stable than KDE4 was, since the underlying changes aren’t anywhere near as severe.

    As for UI, I’ve not looked closely enough at the new shell to really appreciate what’s changing there, but I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on progress over the next year…

  3. Stormking Says:

    Can please someone tell the Zeitgeist guys that it’s a bad idea to show all your warez in a public screencast? Esspecially when your tool is about to become a part of GNOME. It can become a PR nightmare and it’s very unprofessional. It makes GNOME look like being “clicked together” by some not-too-smart highschool kids.

  4. danne Says:

    I agree with 1 and 2, but not the last one, I can definitely see a good reason to evolve.


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