Explanation time
December 14, 2005 12:56 pm gnomeSo – I’d like to explain what I meant yesterday.
I completely agree with jdub: we’ve lost a lot of momentum users and that we need them back.
I also agree with this:
We shouldn’t ignore it just because it’s Linus and we shouldn’t be overwhelmed by it just because it’s Linus.
A while back, we lost Jamie Zawinsky – another momentum user.
http://jwz.livejournal.com/78731.html
http://jwz.livejournal.com/337238.html?thread=3647062#t3647062
http://jwz.livejournal.com/494040.html
That hurt (for me) more than Linus’s outburst because Jamie’s always been more or less polite when dealing with us in Bugzilla, has always attached his complaints to concrete functional problems, hasn’t assumed that things are the way they are deliberately, and in general, hasn’t called us “fucking idiots”.
Some people’s opinions *do* count more than others, and a lot of the weight an opinion gets in my mind comes from the level of respect the person across the way has for me, and the other members of this project.
Of course, if someone other than Linus was involved, it wouldn’t have ended up on pgo, slashdot and newsforge. More’s the pity.
December 15th, 2005 at 12:18 am
Dave, pleasing everyone is simply impossible. You can’t make everyone happy and it’s not really smart to try to, IMHO.
If you accept all features, you end up with bloatware instead of software. Software should be _designed_ and features should be part of that design.
If features break design, either they should be rejected, or design should be revisited.
As for Linus, being passionate is one thing, being rude and ignoring what other people say is the other thing.
If I’m trying to do something that should Just Work ™ and somebody, no matter what important he has done before, comes and says that I take my users for idiots, while I don’t, I do have all right to think that there is something wrong with this guy. This guy is particalarly Linus. No more, no less.
It was a pretty irrelevant idea to start a local department of Slashdot in a list, where developers discuss interoperability of their desktop environments.
December 15th, 2005 at 12:48 am
I keep seeing it referenced, but I still can’t find where Linus called Gnomies “fucking idiots”. Was it not part of this recent thread, some time in the past or something?
December 15th, 2005 at 1:12 am
Mikey:
http://lists.osdl.org/pipermail/desktop_architects/2005-December/000395.html
December 15th, 2005 at 2:06 am
What I don’t understand is why people keep referencing OS X (e.g in this case, what JWZ left *linux* in favour of) in this discussion without mentioning that it is a platform whose raison d’etre is ‘usability’ which it achieves mainly by *leaving stuff out*.
Go read the highly humerous Apple Product Cyle (http://www.misterbg.org/AppleProductCycle/) which should be familiar to anyone who follows Apple and note the lines:
“[Steve Jobs] finally introduces the new Apple product. The product has sleek, clean lines, a diminutive form factor, and less than half of the useful features that everyone was expecting.”
Go look at Apple ‘zealot’ forums and you’ll find old timers still bitchin about when Apple bought SoundJam (1998?) and turned it into iTunes and how they still haven’t re-implemented all the features they took out.
They have however totally owned the digital music market with their stripped down iTunes and the iPod which, the surprisingly large number of iPod haters will happily tell you, doesn’t even have a radio (or recording / DivX / Ogg / Flac / Bluetooth etc. etc.)
Apple gets a pass on many of these things from people, but if any lesson is to be taken from them then it should be for Gnome to keep on keeping on. Yes it’s hard to take things out but more and more things are being written with UI focus the first time so there is no-one coming to depend on obscure features that are destined for the chop.
How people moving to Mac OS X can be interpreted as a point against Gnome in what is being framed (somewhat simplisticly/childishly) as Gnome vs. KDE escapes me. JWZ makes specific mention of his experiences with KDE developers being even less encouraging.
(PS Note I could have written almost the exact same post about the changeover from Mozilla Seamonkey to Firefox where in one fell swoop an email client, chat, etc. were removed and a thousand other bits of crack dumped wholesale. Dave Hyatt went on the record, iirc, saying that he’d rather break and/or remove stuff so there was a demand for it to get fixed right rather than live with an accumulation of kludges and ‘fix-me’ preferences.)
(PPS see also Ruby on Rails)
December 15th, 2005 at 3:00 am
Dave S, there is a difference between OS X and GNOME: GNOME would have a hard time evolving if it did not have a vibrant community of users and hackers contributing to the project. It could probably survive for a while and try to catch up with competing projects, but it would have lost all hope of becoming the best destkop.
The problem is that for various reasons (justified or not), GNOME is alientating some great hackers who could contribute to it. It does not matter that JWZ leaves for OS X or KDE or an XBox or whatever: the problem is that he left. Same for Linus or anybody else.
I do not think that the current situation is really critical. But if some great hackers leave GNOME for something else, then it would be good for the GNOME community to think about how to avoid this and how to make GNOME more attractive for hackers.
December 15th, 2005 at 4:06 am
He didn’t call Gnomies “fucking idiots”. Read it again. He called anyone who uses “usability” as a excuse for needed features not being implemented instead of “not enough programming resources” a “fucking idiot”. The former is a dangerous practice that has been increasing in the Gnome project; the later is the responsible response to a feature not being implemented.
December 15th, 2005 at 3:19 pm
I hate to say it, but Linus is just not being balanced. We’ve seen it a few times now, and despite being intelligent he can’t see Gnome for what it is: a completely reasonable approach, driven by reasonable ideals. Kde is reasonable too, as is Aqua and Windows.
Personally I prefer Gnome to other systems, and am really productive with it (programming, photo editing, organizing music, etc.). It’s quiet, unobtrusive, and damned useful. The various simplifications have been smart, and the ones that aren’t are quickly fixed. I also love the many language bindings, and the general architecture is simple and effective.
So what if Linus doesn’t like it? Too bad, I do.
I’ve watched Gnome developments since pre 1.0, and the direction is sound. They’ve wandered a few times, heard the complaints, and listened. I have yet to see them ignore any of the fundimental concerns. Sure, they’re still aiming at a simple, quiet experience: but that hasn’t yet come at the cost of utility.
December 16th, 2005 at 8:23 am
Many of you are still taking Linus’ choice of language too seriously and even personally. That would be understandable if you were absolute newbies, laymen or wanting to use his words for ulterior purposes but you guys should really know already that Linus uses his words merely as a tool to get messages through, and it appears to have worked.
Nobody’s going to jump to KDE because Linus sarcastically said so, but many of us low-level (and long-time) Gnomers are glad that some serious debate about what to do about GNOME’s current *over-simplification* is finally taking place.