3 ms·

Nooooo! That is the most frustrating thing about some projects: They take existing users for granted and make a lot of changes to accommodate the new users th

Nooooo! That is the most frustrating thing about some projects: They take existing users for granted and make a lot of changes to accommodate the new users they envision coming in torrents. These users of course never arrive and in the meantime they have alienated the old user base. With KDE you can put the tabs where you want them. Or, if you want everything to be like in Gnome or Windows or Mac you can just use these.

aseipp 3y ago
In KDE's case the "you can just customize it" works both ways though. They could change the defaults and instead and let old users customize it back to the old way it was, rather than every new user customizing it. It comes across as a pretty weak argument. The reality is that most users are simply bitterly opposed to change, especially in "subjective" parts of the system like UI design, and it has nothing to do with whether or not the change is actually an improvement that helps people, or can be undone with in 1 minute through a KWin tweak, or whatever. The very example you're theorizing about (accomodating new users who don't yet exist through UI improvements) actually has happened before with positive and negative examples e.g. Blender's complete UI overhaul in 2.8 which was widely praised, versus Gimp which continues to receive flack for its UI choices, versus Gnome which people just endlessly argue over both ways. It is not as simple as "New UI bad, old UI good" no matter how common of a mindset (and how over-represented) that is here. Developers of the project have to balance these concerns as they see fit, and that is their right. Being an older user of the project (or any user, actually) does not mean every decision and plan in the project is going to revolve around you exclusively, at the end of the day.
- eviks 3y ago
  They shouldn't require wasting time to get the old behavior, though, that's indeed alienating, it should instead be saved to user config and preserved on updates
- account42 3y ago
  > and let old users customize it back to the old way it was That's a weird way to write "and automatically import settings from previous versions to keep the behavior the same without user effort".
eviks 3y ago
They "of course never arrive" because of course you never implemented the proper match in behavior But the old users can have it too, that's what configurability is for, just save the state to user config and don't change any such behavior on upgrades, only for fresh installs
- eitland 3y ago
  Look to Mozilla and Ubuntu to see and organization and a company that "bet the farm" on new users by systematically breaking everything we loved them for. The problem with these (and many other UX initiatives) is there isn't a fallback for us who used them from the start. If there was it wouldn't have been a problem.
  - eviks 3y ago
    The lack of fallback is a problem, but that's a different one. And there are even more examples of orgs that didn't bet on new users and simply died off (though that didn't stop them from breaking things)
    - eitland 3y ago
      And then you have vim. Same as always. Yet still the same as it was. Same goes for KDE (if you forget 4), Windows (more or less if you skip Windows 8) since 95, bash, LibreOffice.

aseipp 3y ago

In KDE's case the "you can just customize it" works both ways though. They could change the defaults and instead and let old users customize it back to the old way it was, rather than every new user customizing it. It comes across as a pretty weak argument. The reality is that most users are simply bitterly opposed to change, especially in "subjective" parts of the system like UI design, and it has nothing to do with whether or not the change is actually an improvement that helps people, or can be undone with in 1 minute through a KWin tweak, or whatever. The very example you're theorizing about (accomodating new users who don't yet exist through UI improvements) actually has happened before with positive and negative examples e.g. Blender's complete UI overhaul in 2.8 which was widely praised, versus Gimp which continues to receive flack for its UI choices, versus Gnome which people just endlessly argue over both ways. It is not as simple as "New UI bad, old UI good" no matter how common of a mindset (and how over-represented) that is here. Developers of the project have to balance these concerns as they see fit, and that is their right. Being an older user of the project (or any user, actually) does not mean every decision and plan in the project is going to revolve around you exclusively, at the end of the day.

eviks 3y ago
They shouldn't require wasting time to get the old behavior, though, that's indeed alienating, it should instead be saved to user config and preserved on updates
account42 3y ago
> and let old users customize it back to the old way it was That's a weird way to write "and automatically import settings from previous versions to keep the behavior the same without user effort".

eviks 3y ago

They "of course never arrive" because of course you never implemented the proper match in behavior But the old users can have it too, that's what configurability is for, just save the state to user config and don't change any such behavior on upgrades, only for fresh installs

eitland 3y ago
Look to Mozilla and Ubuntu to see and organization and a company that "bet the farm" on new users by systematically breaking everything we loved them for. The problem with these (and many other UX initiatives) is there isn't a fallback for us who used them from the start. If there was it wouldn't have been a problem.
- eviks 3y ago
  The lack of fallback is a problem, but that's a different one. And there are even more examples of orgs that didn't bet on new users and simply died off (though that didn't stop them from breaking things)
  - eitland 3y ago
    And then you have vim. Same as always. Yet still the same as it was. Same goes for KDE (if you forget 4), Windows (more or less if you skip Windows 8) since 95, bash, LibreOffice.