Archive for 2005-12-15

Actually, Linus’ comment is just plagiarism. The author of GNOME entry in uncyclopedia has coined the term ‘nazi‘ for a long while (until Nov 2005) before Linus does the same. Although this page is apparently written by some anti-GNOME people, it really has some bit of truth contained deep inside, otherwise people won’t be saying that.

This reminds me of a very old bug report; because GNOME is used for converting Windows users to Linux, so layout and usage must follow Windows one? No improvement is allowed? What mentality is this?

I wonder what kind of ‘care for users’ is this. In the example of calculators, what users are most familiar with is hand calculator. They have been using hand calculators for years, and certainly wouldn’t find any difficulty if UI of calculator programs resemble hand ones (well, except HP ones, postfix notation are really for computers, not for human). But then they make decision based on Windows’ crappy one!

This also highlights the fact that almost all usability decision is made by one single person, and all words from this person’s mouth is taken as word from God, no question allowed. Dare to oppose it? Prepare yourself to be burned alive.

Sometimes, it is very amusing to see GNOME’s changes. For example, the whole group of Gods have been insisting for years that, it is the best to open Control Center in Nautilus mode. Now what? Why going back to shell mode which is declared dead and wrong [by core developers] for years?

For GTK+ filechooser dialog, I’d prefer current one rather than previous one (which even managed to have “.” and “..” hardcoded in source code!). But it doesn’t prevent me making this comment: disallowing users to type full path by default is a braindead decision. “You can also press
Ctrl+L to get a text box with autocomplete”… this Havoc Pennington, I want to shoot at his head. Who knows Ctrl+L exists!? Who knows which key is for which function? Apparently all GNOME developers and supports think all users in the world can figure out Ctrl+L magically. Which word can I use to describe it except ‘braindead’?

Indeed, it is also true that this opinion is not representing 100% of users, but only those abandoned by GNOME or vice versa, as Jeff said. Yet not many core developers are thinking like that. For them, “I care about you” means “I decided it is good for you to only do this and not do that”. Brutal parental ‘care’ without (the need of) any discussion. From my observation of communities in these years, this mentality is very common for self-assigned gods. If this trend continues, in the end GNOME would see more opposers who used to be supporters, like Eugenia.