8 ms·

On why removing features makes people unhappy

81 points by dgsiegel 13y ago

pattisapu 13y ago
I wonder if this principle also applies to how legislatures and agencies monotonically expand the total body of laws and regulations. It's often too politically dangerous to deprecate a law.
quchen 13y ago
That's a rather long article for stating the obvious. It worries me a little that the author seems to have just found out about it though, and what's even weirder is the conclusion, which says that now he found out where the anger is from he can enjoy it while working on as usual.
- rachelbythebay 13y ago
  It looks like it's time to break out this one again: http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html Be sure to note the date on this.
  - Afforess 13y ago
    As a maintainer and volunteer on some open source projects, the reason for CADT is that popular projects receive significantly more bug reports than could ever be handled by their volunteers. We're just volunteers and you can't just throw more developers at the problem. In the end, you get what you pay for. Nothing.
    - shadowfox 13y ago
      > significantly more bug reports than could ever be handled by their volunteers Maybe I misunderstood this. So are you saying that the same volunteers can handle a total rewrite of the module maintaining its specified (hopefully) behavior, while remaining incapable of fixing its bugs?
    - chris_wot 13y ago
      If the bug is still valid, then don't close it. It's not a competition for time to fix! If you don't know if the bug is fixed, don't close it. Certainly don't ask the reporter to log it again!
- ds9 13y ago
  The bit about psychology is "obvious", but the argument falls apart when trying to get from that to the conclusions. It's true that taking away something that people count on makes them unhappy. To declare, however that this is the sole or main reason for the widespread rejection of the Gnome changes requires more evidence. It is definitely false in the case of many users (myself included). It's really just a variant of the old line "you dislike this only because it's different; but try it our way and you'll find it's better". This is a dishonest, and frankly an offensive rhetorical trick. It presumes to know the reader's mind better than the reader does; implies that familiarity is the only reason anyone ever prefers one thing over another; and assumes that all change is always good - all of which is absurd. Similarly in the linked article, the author pretends that there is no objection based on the actual merits of the software: in other words, users object that the removal makes the software less useful, and the writer pretends to misunderstand the complaint as "we now have n - 1 features instead of n features". He even arrogantly says that some features they "shouldn't have had in the first place" - when in reality, people complain because they were using the feature for something they cared about and aren't satisfied with the new way. The really important hidden premise of apologists like this is that there are no intrinsic merits of one design over another - that it's only a matter of style and fashion and what's familiar, and there's never any factor of one way being intrinsically better or worse suited to the interaction of human and device. That's a big assumption, but once they've put in a huge amount of work based on it, they can't even admit that anyone could have any intelligent objection, and defensively blame any dissent on an irrational emotional response. The same observations apply in the case of Ubuntu Unity and Windows 8: the root cause of their failure is a sort of paternalism where the GUI designers disregard what users actually prefer, and can't even admit that the preferences are based on practical workflow considerations rather than emotional reactions.
spupy 13y ago
latest feature removed: capital letters.
- Anderkent 13y ago
  WONTFIX: users do not need capital letters. Any users pretending to have had need for capital letters are just expressing their disgruntlement over losing something they felt they possessed. That doesn't mean we think users are stupid, just that they have no idea what they actually need or use.
  - ivix 13y ago
    furthermore in the upcoming release we will complete the process by eliminating clutter such as punctuation and paragraphs we welcome comments on this but we will merely read them smilingly with a bag of popcorn
captainmuon 13y ago
Or, you know, people are unhappy because they actually used those features. And it doesn't surprise me at all that Gnome Devs read Machiavelli.
- mordae 13y ago
  Is he trying to imply that he is in charge and we are just those silly peons who don't understand motivation of their ruler? Because that's a complete bullshit. While I tend to agree with most things they did in the past few years, some are just plain idiotic. For example the type to search instead of prefix matching in nautilus just plain doesn't work, while the original feature have been replaced. I feel like I've received a 7 inch tablet to hack on a C project.
- elmindreda 13y ago
  Yes, this. I'm not angry over the removal of compact list mode from Nautilus because of "loss of freedom", but because it's the mode I find superior to all other view modes.
- serf 13y ago
  while Machiavelli isn't bad, I laughed about that too. It fits pretty well.
- hobs 13y ago
  Yep. I laughed that their response to users complaining about removing features is not to question if the feature was useful or not, but to claim that it is simply the world raging against this idea of its freedom's taken away without any acknowledgement that the feature may have actually been useful. While I understand gnome gets a lot of hate and that they might take up that tact as a defense mechanism instead of actually dealing with it, it bodes really poorly for their user interface.
- jkldotio 13y ago
  Yes it's amazingly patronizing to assume that the people were wrong given I rarely see any statistical evidence or usability studies behind GNOME changes. It's quite possible they were right and the GNOME devs were wrong. Or, even more likely, that they are both right for two different groups and that feature X could perhaps be removed from an icon bar but not from a submenu. Too often in the past GNOME removed the availability of a feature entirely. The people using that feature "owned" it, thus following the first quote the removal impinged on their "property", and then the GNOME devs would insult people for wanting it because it was "wrong", impinging on their "honour". It's only through assuming GNOME devs are infallible and the people are wrong that allows this guy to use the second quote, which boils down to "children want their toys", to cancel the first and then "smilingly fall back in my chair and enjoy reading mean comments with a bag of popcorn". Also I agree with the others regarding the lack of capitalization, but I suppose we are all "wrong" on this.
seszett 13y ago
Reading this text with no capitals at all is quite a pain. It feels like you are just trying to look special by not following a thousand-year-old standard.
- catenate 13y ago
  I noticed right away that the title had no capital letters. But I didn't notice that the body had none until I read this comment and looked back over the text. Neither time did the lack of capitals bother me.
  - seszett 13y ago
    I noticed it while trying to make sense of the first sentence which seemed strangely constructed and syntactically wrong. Then after reading it again once or twice, I saw there were periods where I did not expect them.
RyanMcGreal 13y ago
You know what's a nice feature? Capitalization. Removing it did not make this essay better.
- emhart 13y ago
  Precisely. I was 2 paragraphs in when the total lack of capitalization had me distracted beyond comfort.
  - laurent123456 13y ago
    I didn't went past the first paragraph before opening Chrome DOM inspector and checking if some "text-transform:lowercase;" had been forgotten somewhere, but no it's apparently on purpose.
- bouke 13y ago
  Stopped me after the first 2 sentences.
  - FreshCode 13y ago
    The font is also hard-to-read :\. http://contrastrebellion.com/ http://contrastrebellion.com/
    - bhauer 13y ago
      Yes. The font weight is too light and it's #333333. I switched the text to black and weight 600. Then I read the whole thing and I now wish I had stopped after two sentences like so many others.
- sergiosgc 13y ago
  Thanks. I was about to post the same remark, and then I would be the one passing off as grammar nazi.
  - RyanMcGreal 13y ago
girvo 13y ago
The GNOME situation frustrates me as a would-be-linux-desktop-app developer. Thankfully, Qt has been getting better and better, and I hope to see a usable and powerful DE written in it sometime soon: Unity, while nice, sometimes feels a bit lacking, and is far too controlled by Canonical. GNOME used to be the go-to "Community" DE that I relied on, and I tinkered around with using it as my GUI toolkit as well. Now, it doesn't feel community run at all, and as a GUI toolkit, Qt is much nicer. I wonder if this will change in the future?
- cacat 13y ago
  > Thankfully, Qt has been getting better and better, and I hope to see a usable and powerful DE written in it sometime soon You mean like KDE?
  - coldtea 13y ago
    No, he said "usable". Joking aside, he is obviously aware of KDE and didn't mention it for a reason, presumably because it's not what he wants to see.
    - girvo 13y ago
      Bang on target there. Plasma is cool, but KDE doesn't float my boat :)
      - shadowfox 13y ago
        Razor (http://www.razor-qt.org/ http://www.razor-qt.org/) is worth a look. It is not that polished yet. But hopefully things improve a lot once the merger with LXDE happens (http://blog.lxde.org/?p=1046 http://blog.lxde.org/?p=1046)
    - cacat 13y ago
      :) I know a lot of people hate KDE because of the early 4.x builds. It has gotten a lot better now, and it's constantly getting even better. If this is the case, he should take it for a spin. I find that it's the most customizable and user centric DE around. There are a lot of settings you can tweak, probably too much for some, but I know each time I test Gnome/Unity/Xfce/Lxde/Cinnamon etc. I miss a lot of easily accessible settings. The community is also great, there is a saying: KDE is the community, not the software.
stevoski 13y ago
I've found any change in the software I develop and sell can produce a "I don't like this change" response, whether it is removing features, changing features, or adding something. As a software developer and producer, one needs to develop thick skin. If I make a change and one person complains, I need to remind myself that other people like it. However, if many people complain about a specific change, then I should listen, try to understand their perspective, and consider rolling back and/or adding an option to have things either the old way or the new way. With the "add an option" approach, however, one must be careful not to gain lots and lots of UI-cluttering options in the Preferences. The "add an option" approach can also result in more complicated customer support - users inadvertently turn off features/changes in the Preferences. So there are a number of issues being balanced here: the customer's (or user's) dislike for change; the potentially real complaint that the change has worsened the software for some users; keeping the software flexible; but not drowning the user with too many unnecessary options; nor making customer support too complicated.
iamthepieman 13y ago
What a disappointing end to a post that started with such great potential. So you read (and agree with apparently) about why people don't like to have things taken away from them and then, you just sit back and enjoy the reaction. I would think that having understood the reaction, you might have tried to lessen it, or re-frame taking features away into something else (even if the end result is the same).
- dsego 13y ago
  I was waiting for the lesson, but there is none. Disappointing end.
virtualwhys 13y ago
So, remove features -- even incredibly useful ones like f'ing drag & drop, no drag & drop across the entire interface! -- and kick back in Prince'ly fashion enjoying the cries of the masses. What he's suggesting, depending on which of Machiavelli's kingdom types the author is referring to, is actually either the wrong approach (the people revolt [leave Gnome]) or the ruthless tyrannical approach (crush [ignore] the cries of the masses and force the prince's system on the people without any lenience [concessions]). Blog poster basically comes across as a bit of a sociopath. Gnome 3 is not "all" bad, BTW, but some of the (missing) functionality is a daily PITA.
- homosaur 13y ago
  "Blog poster basically comes across as a bit of a sociopath." Seems like it represents the general view by users of the Gnome team. He points out that the perception of the Gnome team is anti-user, that they are tone deaf and don't care enough about the community. He doesn't argue against it, mind you, and then goes on to largely reinforce the correctness of the called-out viewpoint. He was reading The Prince and now he gets what all those dumb serfs were rioting about.
  - Khaine 13y ago
    The more things change, the more things stay the same. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/04/linux_desktop_failure_flames/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/04/linux_desktop_failur...
ivix 13y ago
I would really like to know where this bizzare attitude has come from. At what point exactly did the gnome devs decide that they were at war with their users?
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  this isn't new - it was several years ago - imo this goes back at least 10 years.
- Khaine 13y ago
  GNOME developers have been well known twats for a long long time. They tinker and remove things for the better all the time, usually sighting some crap UX survey or some such nonsense. They also have a passionate hatred of giving users choice.
  - FooBarWidget 13y ago
    UX surveys are crap? How is blindly implementing something any better than listening to UX surveys?
    - chris_wot 13y ago
      He said "some crap UX survey", not "UX surveys are crap".
JulianMorrison 13y ago
Yeah great, you go stay over there with your dwindling band of Gnome 3 supplicants, I'll be over here with the people who've simply walked away. Ubuntu Studio, XFCE, no worries.
likeclockwork 13y ago
Gnome 2 was SO configurable that I couldn't get on with Gnome 3 at all. I haven't tried it in well over a year at this point.. so I can't speak to recent changes. There was a lot I actually liked about it--but way too many features were either missing or narrowly restricted for me to build a fast and comfortable workflow on. I went to KDE for a while and then went all out, had a much better time.. then I questioned the need for a DE at all and have been using xmonad by itself for most of the past year. So.. thank you Gnome developers for making my question the need for having a DE! If I wanted a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all, company-approved UX.. I'd buy one in a pretty silver box. This guy just comes across as incredibly smug. Does the ego-trip come free when you buy a ticket to chase the silver-box UX for your own product and its completely different userbase with entirely different needs and expectations?
- sampo 13y ago
  > Gnome 2 IMHO Xfce4 has reached the level that now it does the Gnome 2 thing better than Gnome 2 did. (Just needs some tweaking, if you don't like the default blue theme.)
- greyfade 13y ago
  Gnome 1 was so configurable, that I couldn't get on with Gnome 2 at all. I haven't tried it in over 10 years at this point... So I can't speak to recent changes. There was a lot I actually liked about it [Gnome 1] -- but way too many features were either missing or narrowly restricted for me to build a fast and comfortable workflow on. I went to KDE for a while and then went all out, switched to Xmonad, and had a much better time. Then I questioned the need for a DE at all. Unfortunately, with all the problems I run into in keeping my Haskell libraries up-to-date, that I decided to try Gnome 3, and I've been using it by itself for most of the past couple years. So... Thank you Gnome developers for reminding me that you have no clue what users need! ... No, seriously, I think Gnome 1 had a lot over Gnome 2, and it amuses me to no end that people prefer Gnome 2 over Gnome 3.
thaumaturgy 13y ago
Ah, another missive from a software developer who regards users as a mere annoyance, just discovered Machiavelli, and favors intuition over feedback from those users (because intuition always trumps evidence, unless you're A/B testing the color of your "sign up now!" button, in which case evidence always trumps intuition). Never seen anything like this before. If you like Gnome, great. If you don't like Gnome, you should use something else. Arguing this old subject hasn't yet accomplished anything, and there are plenty of alternatives available now. (I really like KDE4.) If project developers are genuinely screwing their pooch, then a stampede to alternatives will convince them far more thoroughly than even the most well-crafted internet argument. If there's no stampede, then people are just arguing personal preferences in the face of popular preferences, and they'd still be better off switching to something else. Save passionate arguing for situations in which it can do some good.
- wmil 13y ago
  > If you like Gnome, great. If you don't like Gnome, you should use something else. Arguing this old subject hasn't yet accomplished anything, and there are plenty of alternatives available now. (I really like KDE4.) The problem is that a lot of people liked Gnome2 but dislike Gnome3. They feel betrayed because the Gnome team killed their favorite desktop environment on a whim, and that sort of thing isn't supposed to happen with open source. Due to Gnome 2 / 3 name conflicts maintaining Gnome 2 is fairly difficult. Basically the Gnome devs wanted to go in a new direction and are abusing their powers to kill off the old product. Users have legitimate reason to to upset.
  - shadowfox 13y ago
    The take it or fork it mentality is pretty entrenched in many opensource projects. So that is not really surprising. (Of course this is not always practical; but hey, people online argue philosophy over practicality, right :P)
belorn 13y ago
It's good that Gnome developers recognize that users do get unhappy when Gnome removes features or makes non-backwards compatible changes. Next step is of course to find understanding that users' reactions are based on numerous reasons, rather than originating from one source. Losing access to features previously found is one cause, but so is the lack of rational and balanced discussions explaining why the features were removed, and missing instructions on how to get similar functionality in Gnome 3, or the lack of tools to migrate old Gnome 2 applications to Gnome 3. To take a comparing example of Gnome2->Gnome3, lets look at Python 2->Python 3 and see what the Python Software Foundation did right. #1: Features removed were announced years before they were removed, with clear instructions on how to migrate to better and improved features. #2: 2to3 was invented, an automatic translator for source code from Python 2 to Python 3, to make it easy for developers to migrate over to new version. #3: Any feature that was removed had clear documentation and discussion that explained why it was removed, and what users could do to move forward. #4: New features were back-ported from Python 3 and made available in Python 2. This allowed users to test out things from the security and familiarity of Python 2, without getting tangled in all the changes at once in Python 3. #5: Python 2 and Python 3 was/is developed in parallel, giving people plenty of glimpses (and warnings) of the future, and insight over what would be future safe activities. Gnome 3 did none of these things. One could argue that there were practical reasons why, but not doing any of those things will hurt a project. At any rate, I have not seen Gnome 3 give any practical reasons why they did such an abrupt move from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3, beyond that they "had to". (Written by a Gnome 3 user, on Gnome 3)
- zimbatm 13y ago
  #6: The target audience is generally one who is interested in computers and is less resistant to change. If they had created a new product instead of bumping Gnome's version number all these problems would have gone away because the user's expectation is to have something different instead of an evolution of an existing product.
- tinco 13y ago
  I'm not very familiar with the Gnome team, but isn't this just a resource problem? They're trying to build a better product, and they're only a bunch of part-time volunteers. At some point they had a bunch of features, but to keep up with the other desktops (Aero, Quartz) they had to focus on rearchitecting and, being a small team, there haven't enough manpower to keep all the features. I also don't think language (api's) are not at all comparable to desktop environments. There's just so much going on in a desktop environment.
alipang 13y ago
This is so bizarre. He's not even taking the Machiavellian advice, which would be to actually _not_ take stuff away from your users (assuming he wants happy users, which, I guess, doesn't actually concern him). Instead he's satisfied having de-constructed users' reactions, and just leaves it at that. It's like saying I figured out _why_ punching you in the face will make you upset, so I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the show.
- deoxxa 13y ago
  Yeah, I was really expecting it to end with "so here's what I'm going to do to try to make the situation better," instead of "HA HA DELICIOUS TEARS."
chris_wot 13y ago
Removing features that people use makes them unhappy because they can no longer use them. That goes for hiding features, like (for example) hiding icons on the desktop, een when in classic mode. Or the up button in Nautilus. Or any one of the dozens of useful things they removed. I was quite a fan of Gnome 2.x, but the "remove features people use because we are right and they are wrong" mentality means I switched back to Windows, and run VirtualBix for my coding, debugging, etc.
jwpe 13y ago
I enjoyed this article right up until the end, when I expected the author to use his new-found knowledge to suggest a method for removing features that caused less friction. Instead, his response was more "Now that I know why people behave this way, I don't need to care about it." Doesn't seem at all constructive to me.
DanBC 13y ago
People loved Gnome 2. I don't know if they loved it enough to pay for all the devs needed to keep it going. I really don't understand the "do not let people customise anything" attitude. I agree that supporting users who have made customisations is annoying and hard; just force people to return to a default config before they make any support requests. I agree that sane defaults are nice, and that option screens are ugly; offer sane defaults, and hide all the config stuff in a text file.
adjwilli 13y ago
My uncaffeinated early-morning mind read the headline as why removing feautes makes people HAPPY. I think that would be a much more interesting article.
yareally 13y ago
Aside from GNOME, one can also look at the Opera Browser community. Many of us were skeptical of the switch to being based on Chromium not because of browser, but because of the fear Opera would throw out many of the powerful features its user base has relied on for years. Heck, Opera wasn't even going to add in normal bookmarking until they received a huge community backlash against it. Many of us have hundreds of bookmarks and the alternative they were providing[1] would have made it a burden to find anything useful when one has more than a few dozen bookmarks. In short, removing features makes people unhappy when they rely on them being there in order to be productive. Adding new features or dramatically altering the way long time ones work, sure go ahead, as long as current users are given the option to keep using those long time features (ones more than a few years old) the same way they expect by undoing some option in settings. Some might scoff at this as being impossible, but that was how Opera actually functioned from the beginning up until the switchover to Chromium in Opera 15. [1] http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2013/07/08/shop-smarter-with-stash http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2013/07/08/shop-smarter...
davidroetzel 13y ago
This is of course total off topic, but since a lot of GNOME-bashing is already happening in the comments here, I would just like to state that I am very, very happy with GNOME3. It perfectly fits my use case (running a few apps fully maximised) and gets out of my way. Also, it is rock solid and has never crashed on me.
- noisy_boy 13y ago
  There are several WMs which were specifically developed from the perspective of being minimal and getting out of the way (Awesome WM comes to mind). One of the main causes behind the bashing is that a perfectly stable Gnome 2 (which was a more mainstream/"full featured" WM) was butchered to create something which took out a lot of functionality people _actually_ use. Obviously your use case, being a much simpler subset of what people typically do with their WMs, would fit in with most of the WMs so maybe the hoopla surprises you.
spinchange 13y ago
Perhaps this is the kind of thing GNOME devs talk about among themselves, but to write it for public consumption and submit to HN, ostensibly looking for validation (or to troll), is a pretty epic PR fail. Not only is the author not taking Machiavelli's advice, he's gloating that he isn't.
_sabe_ 13y ago
I don't think removing features is a problem in it self but the Gnome product has been run like Facebook or any fucking website the last couple of years. Features come and go between releases, half implemented changes trough out the desktop and so on. Normally when you make a products you decide the features and when those are stable, they are set in stone trough out the history of that whole/stable version. If the Gnome team was serious about their product in anyway they would not even pretend to have a stable product, but kept 2x as the stable release until the whole feature set was coherent between all applications.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pessimizer 13y ago
I always thought that The Prince was about how to maintain an amoral dictatorship.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  It is. Why else do you think that a gnome developer quotes from it?
crazygringo 13y ago
> "and since i understand why people react this way, i can smilingly fall back in my chair and enjoy reading mean comments with a bag of popcorn." Wow... so now that you've read Machiavelli and Cialdini, and feel you understand users better... then instead of using that to respond better to them and make the world a better place for them... you decide to take delight in their unhappiness instead? Wow, I've never said something like this on HN before, but unless undetected sarcasm is wooshing over my head: what a prick.
- orclev 13y ago
  Seems right on par for a gnome dev. I also like how he routinely adds "that specific feature was replaced by something better" when most of the features being removed were instead replaced by "TODO: some release way in the future" or a locked down version that prevented you from making any meaningful configuration changes.
- Spooky23 13y ago
  This is a fundamental dilemma for many technology systems. Its expensive to pay down your technical debt, but it's also expensive to streamline. At the end of the they, the GNOME developers own the project. Unlike the people running the MS Excel team, they aren't accountable to customers, just patrons. It's easier to keep patrons happier with a long term vision than the customers who actually use your stuff every day. Apple was able to successfully pull the re-invention thing off a couple of times (iPod, iPhone, iPad) via radical simpification, and whole market is pivoting to try to accomplish the same thing. That creates it's own problems, as now we have Linux and now Windows desktops that really aren't very good from the perspective of the people using them. It's a vicious circle, as the crappyness of the new-"old-style" desktop experience is pushing users into the new "Post-PC" world.
- PhasmaFelis 13y ago
  Yeah, that's pretty much what I came here to say. His philosophy boils down to "I have a janky pop-psych theory that says that users are clueless and mean, so fuck 'em and do what you want." This is terrible. I kinda don't get why there's debate about it.
mixmastamyk 13y ago
The phrase, "Left in a lurch," comes to mind. What bothered me most was that they destroyed gnome2 when creating gnome3 by using the same filesystem namespace. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it didn't seem possible to have both usable on the system. I would have been happy to stay on gnome2 until 3 became mature. But that didn't happen. Despite the numbers we were forced from ~2.30 to 0.5 beta. I know there is the MATE fork, but it wasn't available initially and I'm not keen on learning new names for every single program used. Still, they've gone too far with nautilus... it is now almost useless and I've had to move to thunar to get work done. I don't see why nautilus can't use plugins to add features.
- noisy_boy 13y ago
  I just want to ask this self-indulgent "developer" a single question - what benefit did they get from removing split panes from Nautilus? If people didn't use it, they still wouldn't use it. Those who did were benefiting from the functionality. It wasn't _harming_ anyone! In pursuit of their utopian airy-fairly idea of simplicity, they simply screwed up a perfectly working system which catered to practically all its users just fine.
alyandon 13y ago
I'm looking forward to the eventual day when you log into the GNOME desktop environment and are presented with a single, full-screen button that says "Logout" because all other features have been removed. In all seriousness though, I stopped complaining about GNOME 3 and moved on to Xfce4. The GNOME project developers aren't going to change and they have the right to dictate the direction of the project regardless of whether or not I personally agree with their decisions. Open source is about having choices and my choice was to move to another desktop environment.
sebnukem2 13y ago
Cute essay. Now I still miss my features, and I still think that you think your users are dumb, and that you obviously know better than them now that you've read a book, which prompted you to decide that capitalization needs to be removed as well. Hilarious.
andrelaszlo 13y ago
I was pissed when they "improved" the alt-tab behavior so that I needed to use two hands to switch between two browser windows, for example. Now I'm happy again, having found this: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/ It seems like Gnome is actually allowing MORE freedom now, with this js extension api. If you don't like how it works - just write a small extension.
hvs 13y ago
Translation: "Now that I understand that taking freedoms away is why people get angry when we remove features, I can sit back and enjoy making my users angry, secure in the knowledge that I am right and they didn't need those freedoms in the first place." With guys like this working on Gnome, it doesn't need enemies.
forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
"they are fundamentally telling us that they are disgruntled that we took away something that they had before. the sapid fact is that it does not matter if it was replaced by something better or if it was wrong to have it in the first place." It DOES matter when it is replaced by something better for them, not better for the GNOME guys. The GNOME guys consider removing features "better" because it makes their lives easier, less combinatorial bugs, less work designing, less work fixing, more centralization and why not to say it, ego boost and power(users do exactly what I design, how important I am). So the fact that something is "better" for them does not mean that the user is going to consider it "better". The fact that you are already forcing your users to learn something new is worse by default, so it has to be really much much better for them to have to change their own routines. Humans are routine animals. Don't break the routines.

81 points by dgsiegel 13y ago

I wonder if this principle also applies to how legislatures and agencies monotonically expand the total body of laws and regulations. It's often too politically dangerous to deprecate a law.

quchen 13y ago

That's a rather long article for stating the obvious. It worries me a little that the author seems to have just found out about it though, and what's even weirder is the conclusion, which says that now he found out where the anger is from he can enjoy it while working on as usual.

rachelbythebay 13y ago
It looks like it's time to break out this one again: http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html Be sure to note the date on this.
- Afforess 13y ago
  As a maintainer and volunteer on some open source projects, the reason for CADT is that popular projects receive significantly more bug reports than could ever be handled by their volunteers. We're just volunteers and you can't just throw more developers at the problem. In the end, you get what you pay for. Nothing.
  - shadowfox 13y ago
    > significantly more bug reports than could ever be handled by their volunteers Maybe I misunderstood this. So are you saying that the same volunteers can handle a total rewrite of the module maintaining its specified (hopefully) behavior, while remaining incapable of fixing its bugs?
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    If the bug is still valid, then don't close it. It's not a competition for time to fix! If you don't know if the bug is fixed, don't close it. Certainly don't ask the reporter to log it again!
ds9 13y ago
The bit about psychology is "obvious", but the argument falls apart when trying to get from that to the conclusions. It's true that taking away something that people count on makes them unhappy. To declare, however that this is the sole or main reason for the widespread rejection of the Gnome changes requires more evidence. It is definitely false in the case of many users (myself included). It's really just a variant of the old line "you dislike this only because it's different; but try it our way and you'll find it's better". This is a dishonest, and frankly an offensive rhetorical trick. It presumes to know the reader's mind better than the reader does; implies that familiarity is the only reason anyone ever prefers one thing over another; and assumes that all change is always good - all of which is absurd. Similarly in the linked article, the author pretends that there is no objection based on the actual merits of the software: in other words, users object that the removal makes the software less useful, and the writer pretends to misunderstand the complaint as "we now have n - 1 features instead of n features". He even arrogantly says that some features they "shouldn't have had in the first place" - when in reality, people complain because they were using the feature for something they cared about and aren't satisfied with the new way. The really important hidden premise of apologists like this is that there are no intrinsic merits of one design over another - that it's only a matter of style and fashion and what's familiar, and there's never any factor of one way being intrinsically better or worse suited to the interaction of human and device. That's a big assumption, but once they've put in a huge amount of work based on it, they can't even admit that anyone could have any intelligent objection, and defensively blame any dissent on an irrational emotional response. The same observations apply in the case of Ubuntu Unity and Windows 8: the root cause of their failure is a sort of paternalism where the GUI designers disregard what users actually prefer, and can't even admit that the preferences are based on practical workflow considerations rather than emotional reactions.

spupy 13y ago

latest feature removed: capital letters.

Anderkent 13y ago
WONTFIX: users do not need capital letters. Any users pretending to have had need for capital letters are just expressing their disgruntlement over losing something they felt they possessed. That doesn't mean we think users are stupid, just that they have no idea what they actually need or use.
- ivix 13y ago
  furthermore in the upcoming release we will complete the process by eliminating clutter such as punctuation and paragraphs we welcome comments on this but we will merely read them smilingly with a bag of popcorn

captainmuon 13y ago

Or, you know, people are unhappy because they actually used those features. And it doesn't surprise me at all that Gnome Devs read Machiavelli.

mordae 13y ago
Is he trying to imply that he is in charge and we are just those silly peons who don't understand motivation of their ruler? Because that's a complete bullshit. While I tend to agree with most things they did in the past few years, some are just plain idiotic. For example the type to search instead of prefix matching in nautilus just plain doesn't work, while the original feature have been replaced. I feel like I've received a 7 inch tablet to hack on a C project.
elmindreda 13y ago
Yes, this. I'm not angry over the removal of compact list mode from Nautilus because of "loss of freedom", but because it's the mode I find superior to all other view modes.
serf 13y ago
while Machiavelli isn't bad, I laughed about that too. It fits pretty well.
hobs 13y ago
Yep. I laughed that their response to users complaining about removing features is not to question if the feature was useful or not, but to claim that it is simply the world raging against this idea of its freedom's taken away without any acknowledgement that the feature may have actually been useful. While I understand gnome gets a lot of hate and that they might take up that tact as a defense mechanism instead of actually dealing with it, it bodes really poorly for their user interface.
jkldotio 13y ago
Yes it's amazingly patronizing to assume that the people were wrong given I rarely see any statistical evidence or usability studies behind GNOME changes. It's quite possible they were right and the GNOME devs were wrong. Or, even more likely, that they are both right for two different groups and that feature X could perhaps be removed from an icon bar but not from a submenu. Too often in the past GNOME removed the availability of a feature entirely. The people using that feature "owned" it, thus following the first quote the removal impinged on their "property", and then the GNOME devs would insult people for wanting it because it was "wrong", impinging on their "honour". It's only through assuming GNOME devs are infallible and the people are wrong that allows this guy to use the second quote, which boils down to "children want their toys", to cancel the first and then "smilingly fall back in my chair and enjoy reading mean comments with a bag of popcorn". Also I agree with the others regarding the lack of capitalization, but I suppose we are all "wrong" on this.

seszett 13y ago

Reading this text with no capitals at all is quite a pain. It feels like you are just trying to look special by not following a thousand-year-old standard.

catenate 13y ago
I noticed right away that the title had no capital letters. But I didn't notice that the body had none until I read this comment and looked back over the text. Neither time did the lack of capitals bother me.
- seszett 13y ago
  I noticed it while trying to make sense of the first sentence which seemed strangely constructed and syntactically wrong. Then after reading it again once or twice, I saw there were periods where I did not expect them.

RyanMcGreal 13y ago

You know what's a nice feature? Capitalization. Removing it did not make this essay better.

emhart 13y ago
Precisely. I was 2 paragraphs in when the total lack of capitalization had me distracted beyond comfort.
- laurent123456 13y ago
  I didn't went past the first paragraph before opening Chrome DOM inspector and checking if some "text-transform:lowercase;" had been forgotten somewhere, but no it's apparently on purpose.
bouke 13y ago
Stopped me after the first 2 sentences.
- FreshCode 13y ago
  The font is also hard-to-read :\. http://contrastrebellion.com/ http://contrastrebellion.com/
  - bhauer 13y ago
    Yes. The font weight is too light and it's #333333. I switched the text to black and weight 600. Then I read the whole thing and I now wish I had stopped after two sentences like so many others.
sergiosgc 13y ago
Thanks. I was about to post the same remark, and then I would be the one passing off as grammar nazi.
- RyanMcGreal 13y ago

girvo 13y ago

The GNOME situation frustrates me as a would-be-linux-desktop-app developer. Thankfully, Qt has been getting better and better, and I hope to see a usable and powerful DE written in it sometime soon: Unity, while nice, sometimes feels a bit lacking, and is far too controlled by Canonical. GNOME used to be the go-to "Community" DE that I relied on, and I tinkered around with using it as my GUI toolkit as well. Now, it doesn't feel community run at all, and as a GUI toolkit, Qt is much nicer. I wonder if this will change in the future?

cacat 13y ago
> Thankfully, Qt has been getting better and better, and I hope to see a usable and powerful DE written in it sometime soon You mean like KDE?
- coldtea 13y ago
  No, he said "usable". Joking aside, he is obviously aware of KDE and didn't mention it for a reason, presumably because it's not what he wants to see.
  - girvo 13y ago
    Bang on target there. Plasma is cool, but KDE doesn't float my boat :)
    - shadowfox 13y ago
      Razor (http://www.razor-qt.org/ http://www.razor-qt.org/) is worth a look. It is not that polished yet. But hopefully things improve a lot once the merger with LXDE happens (http://blog.lxde.org/?p=1046 http://blog.lxde.org/?p=1046)
  - cacat 13y ago
    :) I know a lot of people hate KDE because of the early 4.x builds. It has gotten a lot better now, and it's constantly getting even better. If this is the case, he should take it for a spin. I find that it's the most customizable and user centric DE around. There are a lot of settings you can tweak, probably too much for some, but I know each time I test Gnome/Unity/Xfce/Lxde/Cinnamon etc. I miss a lot of easily accessible settings. The community is also great, there is a saying: KDE is the community, not the software.

stevoski 13y ago

I've found any change in the software I develop and sell can produce a "I don't like this change" response, whether it is removing features, changing features, or adding something. As a software developer and producer, one needs to develop thick skin. If I make a change and one person complains, I need to remind myself that other people like it. However, if many people complain about a specific change, then I should listen, try to understand their perspective, and consider rolling back and/or adding an option to have things either the old way or the new way. With the "add an option" approach, however, one must be careful not to gain lots and lots of UI-cluttering options in the Preferences. The "add an option" approach can also result in more complicated customer support - users inadvertently turn off features/changes in the Preferences. So there are a number of issues being balanced here: the customer's (or user's) dislike for change; the potentially real complaint that the change has worsened the software for some users; keeping the software flexible; but not drowning the user with too many unnecessary options; nor making customer support too complicated.

iamthepieman 13y ago

What a disappointing end to a post that started with such great potential. So you read (and agree with apparently) about why people don't like to have things taken away from them and then, you just sit back and enjoy the reaction. I would think that having understood the reaction, you might have tried to lessen it, or re-frame taking features away into something else (even if the end result is the same).

dsego 13y ago
I was waiting for the lesson, but there is none. Disappointing end.

virtualwhys 13y ago

So, remove features -- even incredibly useful ones like f'ing drag & drop, no drag & drop across the entire interface! -- and kick back in Prince'ly fashion enjoying the cries of the masses. What he's suggesting, depending on which of Machiavelli's kingdom types the author is referring to, is actually either the wrong approach (the people revolt [leave Gnome]) or the ruthless tyrannical approach (crush [ignore] the cries of the masses and force the prince's system on the people without any lenience [concessions]). Blog poster basically comes across as a bit of a sociopath. Gnome 3 is not "all" bad, BTW, but some of the (missing) functionality is a daily PITA.

homosaur 13y ago
"Blog poster basically comes across as a bit of a sociopath." Seems like it represents the general view by users of the Gnome team. He points out that the perception of the Gnome team is anti-user, that they are tone deaf and don't care enough about the community. He doesn't argue against it, mind you, and then goes on to largely reinforce the correctness of the called-out viewpoint. He was reading The Prince and now he gets what all those dumb serfs were rioting about.
- Khaine 13y ago
  The more things change, the more things stay the same. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/04/linux_desktop_failure_flames/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/04/linux_desktop_failur...

ivix 13y ago

I would really like to know where this bizzare attitude has come from. At what point exactly did the gnome devs decide that they were at war with their users?

mgkimsal 13y ago
this isn't new - it was several years ago - imo this goes back at least 10 years.
Khaine 13y ago
GNOME developers have been well known twats for a long long time. They tinker and remove things for the better all the time, usually sighting some crap UX survey or some such nonsense. They also have a passionate hatred of giving users choice.
- FooBarWidget 13y ago
  UX surveys are crap? How is blindly implementing something any better than listening to UX surveys?
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    He said "some crap UX survey", not "UX surveys are crap".

JulianMorrison 13y ago

Yeah great, you go stay over there with your dwindling band of Gnome 3 supplicants, I'll be over here with the people who've simply walked away. Ubuntu Studio, XFCE, no worries.

likeclockwork 13y ago

Gnome 2 was SO configurable that I couldn't get on with Gnome 3 at all. I haven't tried it in well over a year at this point.. so I can't speak to recent changes. There was a lot I actually liked about it--but way too many features were either missing or narrowly restricted for me to build a fast and comfortable workflow on. I went to KDE for a while and then went all out, had a much better time.. then I questioned the need for a DE at all and have been using xmonad by itself for most of the past year. So.. thank you Gnome developers for making my question the need for having a DE! If I wanted a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all, company-approved UX.. I'd buy one in a pretty silver box. This guy just comes across as incredibly smug. Does the ego-trip come free when you buy a ticket to chase the silver-box UX for your own product and its completely different userbase with entirely different needs and expectations?

sampo 13y ago
> Gnome 2 IMHO Xfce4 has reached the level that now it does the Gnome 2 thing better than Gnome 2 did. (Just needs some tweaking, if you don't like the default blue theme.)
greyfade 13y ago
Gnome 1 was so configurable, that I couldn't get on with Gnome 2 at all. I haven't tried it in over 10 years at this point... So I can't speak to recent changes. There was a lot I actually liked about it [Gnome 1] -- but way too many features were either missing or narrowly restricted for me to build a fast and comfortable workflow on. I went to KDE for a while and then went all out, switched to Xmonad, and had a much better time. Then I questioned the need for a DE at all. Unfortunately, with all the problems I run into in keeping my Haskell libraries up-to-date, that I decided to try Gnome 3, and I've been using it by itself for most of the past couple years. So... Thank you Gnome developers for reminding me that you have no clue what users need! ... No, seriously, I think Gnome 1 had a lot over Gnome 2, and it amuses me to no end that people prefer Gnome 2 over Gnome 3.

thaumaturgy 13y ago

Ah, another missive from a software developer who regards users as a mere annoyance, just discovered Machiavelli, and favors intuition over feedback from those users (because intuition always trumps evidence, unless you're A/B testing the color of your "sign up now!" button, in which case evidence always trumps intuition). Never seen anything like this before. If you like Gnome, great. If you don't like Gnome, you should use something else. Arguing this old subject hasn't yet accomplished anything, and there are plenty of alternatives available now. (I really like KDE4.) If project developers are genuinely screwing their pooch, then a stampede to alternatives will convince them far more thoroughly than even the most well-crafted internet argument. If there's no stampede, then people are just arguing personal preferences in the face of popular preferences, and they'd still be better off switching to something else. Save passionate arguing for situations in which it can do some good.

wmil 13y ago
> If you like Gnome, great. If you don't like Gnome, you should use something else. Arguing this old subject hasn't yet accomplished anything, and there are plenty of alternatives available now. (I really like KDE4.) The problem is that a lot of people liked Gnome2 but dislike Gnome3. They feel betrayed because the Gnome team killed their favorite desktop environment on a whim, and that sort of thing isn't supposed to happen with open source. Due to Gnome 2 / 3 name conflicts maintaining Gnome 2 is fairly difficult. Basically the Gnome devs wanted to go in a new direction and are abusing their powers to kill off the old product. Users have legitimate reason to to upset.
- shadowfox 13y ago
  The take it or fork it mentality is pretty entrenched in many opensource projects. So that is not really surprising. (Of course this is not always practical; but hey, people online argue philosophy over practicality, right :P)

belorn 13y ago

It's good that Gnome developers recognize that users do get unhappy when Gnome removes features or makes non-backwards compatible changes. Next step is of course to find understanding that users' reactions are based on numerous reasons, rather than originating from one source. Losing access to features previously found is one cause, but so is the lack of rational and balanced discussions explaining why the features were removed, and missing instructions on how to get similar functionality in Gnome 3, or the lack of tools to migrate old Gnome 2 applications to Gnome 3. To take a comparing example of Gnome2->Gnome3, lets look at Python 2->Python 3 and see what the Python Software Foundation did right. #1: Features removed were announced years before they were removed, with clear instructions on how to migrate to better and improved features. #2: 2to3 was invented, an automatic translator for source code from Python 2 to Python 3, to make it easy for developers to migrate over to new version. #3: Any feature that was removed had clear documentation and discussion that explained why it was removed, and what users could do to move forward. #4: New features were back-ported from Python 3 and made available in Python 2. This allowed users to test out things from the security and familiarity of Python 2, without getting tangled in all the changes at once in Python 3. #5: Python 2 and Python 3 was/is developed in parallel, giving people plenty of glimpses (and warnings) of the future, and insight over what would be future safe activities. Gnome 3 did none of these things. One could argue that there were practical reasons why, but not doing any of those things will hurt a project. At any rate, I have not seen Gnome 3 give any practical reasons why they did such an abrupt move from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3, beyond that they "had to". (Written by a Gnome 3 user, on Gnome 3)

zimbatm 13y ago
#6: The target audience is generally one who is interested in computers and is less resistant to change. If they had created a new product instead of bumping Gnome's version number all these problems would have gone away because the user's expectation is to have something different instead of an evolution of an existing product.
tinco 13y ago
I'm not very familiar with the Gnome team, but isn't this just a resource problem? They're trying to build a better product, and they're only a bunch of part-time volunteers. At some point they had a bunch of features, but to keep up with the other desktops (Aero, Quartz) they had to focus on rearchitecting and, being a small team, there haven't enough manpower to keep all the features. I also don't think language (api's) are not at all comparable to desktop environments. There's just so much going on in a desktop environment.

alipang 13y ago

This is so bizarre. He's not even taking the Machiavellian advice, which would be to actually _not_ take stuff away from your users (assuming he wants happy users, which, I guess, doesn't actually concern him). Instead he's satisfied having de-constructed users' reactions, and just leaves it at that. It's like saying I figured out _why_ punching you in the face will make you upset, so I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the show.

deoxxa 13y ago
Yeah, I was really expecting it to end with "so here's what I'm going to do to try to make the situation better," instead of "HA HA DELICIOUS TEARS."

chris_wot 13y ago

Removing features that people use makes them unhappy because they can no longer use them. That goes for hiding features, like (for example) hiding icons on the desktop, een when in classic mode. Or the up button in Nautilus. Or any one of the dozens of useful things they removed. I was quite a fan of Gnome 2.x, but the "remove features people use because we are right and they are wrong" mentality means I switched back to Windows, and run VirtualBix for my coding, debugging, etc.

jwpe 13y ago

I enjoyed this article right up until the end, when I expected the author to use his new-found knowledge to suggest a method for removing features that caused less friction. Instead, his response was more "Now that I know why people behave this way, I don't need to care about it." Doesn't seem at all constructive to me.

DanBC 13y ago

People loved Gnome 2. I don't know if they loved it enough to pay for all the devs needed to keep it going. I really don't understand the "do not let people customise anything" attitude. I agree that supporting users who have made customisations is annoying and hard; just force people to return to a default config before they make any support requests. I agree that sane defaults are nice, and that option screens are ugly; offer sane defaults, and hide all the config stuff in a text file.

adjwilli 13y ago

My uncaffeinated early-morning mind read the headline as why removing feautes makes people HAPPY. I think that would be a much more interesting article.

yareally 13y ago

Aside from GNOME, one can also look at the Opera Browser community. Many of us were skeptical of the switch to being based on Chromium not because of browser, but because of the fear Opera would throw out many of the powerful features its user base has relied on for years. Heck, Opera wasn't even going to add in normal bookmarking until they received a huge community backlash against it. Many of us have hundreds of bookmarks and the alternative they were providing[1] would have made it a burden to find anything useful when one has more than a few dozen bookmarks. In short, removing features makes people unhappy when they rely on them being there in order to be productive. Adding new features or dramatically altering the way long time ones work, sure go ahead, as long as current users are given the option to keep using those long time features (ones more than a few years old) the same way they expect by undoing some option in settings. Some might scoff at this as being impossible, but that was how Opera actually functioned from the beginning up until the switchover to Chromium in Opera 15. [1] http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2013/07/08/shop-smarter-with-stash http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2013/07/08/shop-smarter...

davidroetzel 13y ago

This is of course total off topic, but since a lot of GNOME-bashing is already happening in the comments here, I would just like to state that I am very, very happy with GNOME3. It perfectly fits my use case (running a few apps fully maximised) and gets out of my way. Also, it is rock solid and has never crashed on me.

noisy_boy 13y ago
There are several WMs which were specifically developed from the perspective of being minimal and getting out of the way (Awesome WM comes to mind). One of the main causes behind the bashing is that a perfectly stable Gnome 2 (which was a more mainstream/"full featured" WM) was butchered to create something which took out a lot of functionality people _actually_ use. Obviously your use case, being a much simpler subset of what people typically do with their WMs, would fit in with most of the WMs so maybe the hoopla surprises you.

spinchange 13y ago

Perhaps this is the kind of thing GNOME devs talk about among themselves, but to write it for public consumption and submit to HN, ostensibly looking for validation (or to troll), is a pretty epic PR fail. Not only is the author not taking Machiavelli's advice, he's gloating that he isn't.

_sabe_ 13y ago

I don't think removing features is a problem in it self but the Gnome product has been run like Facebook or any fucking website the last couple of years. Features come and go between releases, half implemented changes trough out the desktop and so on. Normally when you make a products you decide the features and when those are stable, they are set in stone trough out the history of that whole/stable version. If the Gnome team was serious about their product in anyway they would not even pretend to have a stable product, but kept 2x as the stable release until the whole feature set was coherent between all applications.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

pessimizer 13y ago

I always thought that The Prince was about how to maintain an amoral dictatorship.

chris_wot 13y ago
It is. Why else do you think that a gnome developer quotes from it?

crazygringo 13y ago

> "and since i understand why people react this way, i can smilingly fall back in my chair and enjoy reading mean comments with a bag of popcorn." Wow... so now that you've read Machiavelli and Cialdini, and feel you understand users better... then instead of using that to respond better to them and make the world a better place for them... you decide to take delight in their unhappiness instead? Wow, I've never said something like this on HN before, but unless undetected sarcasm is wooshing over my head: what a prick.

orclev 13y ago
Seems right on par for a gnome dev. I also like how he routinely adds "that specific feature was replaced by something better" when most of the features being removed were instead replaced by "TODO: some release way in the future" or a locked down version that prevented you from making any meaningful configuration changes.
Spooky23 13y ago
This is a fundamental dilemma for many technology systems. Its expensive to pay down your technical debt, but it's also expensive to streamline. At the end of the they, the GNOME developers own the project. Unlike the people running the MS Excel team, they aren't accountable to customers, just patrons. It's easier to keep patrons happier with a long term vision than the customers who actually use your stuff every day. Apple was able to successfully pull the re-invention thing off a couple of times (iPod, iPhone, iPad) via radical simpification, and whole market is pivoting to try to accomplish the same thing. That creates it's own problems, as now we have Linux and now Windows desktops that really aren't very good from the perspective of the people using them. It's a vicious circle, as the crappyness of the new-"old-style" desktop experience is pushing users into the new "Post-PC" world.
PhasmaFelis 13y ago
Yeah, that's pretty much what I came here to say. His philosophy boils down to "I have a janky pop-psych theory that says that users are clueless and mean, so fuck 'em and do what you want." This is terrible. I kinda don't get why there's debate about it.

mixmastamyk 13y ago

The phrase, "Left in a lurch," comes to mind. What bothered me most was that they destroyed gnome2 when creating gnome3 by using the same filesystem namespace. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it didn't seem possible to have both usable on the system. I would have been happy to stay on gnome2 until 3 became mature. But that didn't happen. Despite the numbers we were forced from ~2.30 to 0.5 beta. I know there is the MATE fork, but it wasn't available initially and I'm not keen on learning new names for every single program used. Still, they've gone too far with nautilus... it is now almost useless and I've had to move to thunar to get work done. I don't see why nautilus can't use plugins to add features.

noisy_boy 13y ago
I just want to ask this self-indulgent "developer" a single question - what benefit did they get from removing split panes from Nautilus? If people didn't use it, they still wouldn't use it. Those who did were benefiting from the functionality. It wasn't _harming_ anyone! In pursuit of their utopian airy-fairly idea of simplicity, they simply screwed up a perfectly working system which catered to practically all its users just fine.

alyandon 13y ago

I'm looking forward to the eventual day when you log into the GNOME desktop environment and are presented with a single, full-screen button that says "Logout" because all other features have been removed. In all seriousness though, I stopped complaining about GNOME 3 and moved on to Xfce4. The GNOME project developers aren't going to change and they have the right to dictate the direction of the project regardless of whether or not I personally agree with their decisions. Open source is about having choices and my choice was to move to another desktop environment.

sebnukem2 13y ago

Cute essay. Now I still miss my features, and I still think that you think your users are dumb, and that you obviously know better than them now that you've read a book, which prompted you to decide that capitalization needs to be removed as well. Hilarious.

andrelaszlo 13y ago

I was pissed when they "improved" the alt-tab behavior so that I needed to use two hands to switch between two browser windows, for example. Now I'm happy again, having found this: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/ It seems like Gnome is actually allowing MORE freedom now, with this js extension api. If you don't like how it works - just write a small extension.

hvs 13y ago

Translation: "Now that I understand that taking freedoms away is why people get angry when we remove features, I can sit back and enjoy making my users angry, secure in the knowledge that I am right and they didn't need those freedoms in the first place." With guys like this working on Gnome, it doesn't need enemies.

forgottenpaswrd 13y ago

"they are fundamentally telling us that they are disgruntled that we took away something that they had before. the sapid fact is that it does not matter if it was replaced by something better or if it was wrong to have it in the first place." It DOES matter when it is replaced by something better for them, not better for the GNOME guys. The GNOME guys consider removing features "better" because it makes their lives easier, less combinatorial bugs, less work designing, less work fixing, more centralization and why not to say it, ego boost and power(users do exactly what I design, how important I am). So the fact that something is "better" for them does not mean that the user is going to consider it "better". The fact that you are already forcing your users to learn something new is worse by default, so it has to be really much much better for them to have to change their own routines. Humans are routine animals. Don't break the routines.