Proposed F19 Feature: Cinnamon as Default Desktop

[Olav Vitters]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 11:37:31AM +0100, Reindl Harald wrote:
> Am 11.02.2013 11:31, schrieb Olav Vitters:
> > On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 07:59:22PM +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
> >> In the end, more than any usability quibbles, the best reason to give
> >> up on a project is when it refuses to listen to its end users.
> > 
> > The GNOME release notes over various cycles have listed loads of changes
> > which have been made based on the things that have been learned. This
> > happened during 2.x as well as 3.x.
> > 
> > Although you do not explicitly state it, it seems you were talking about
> > GNOME. Vincent Untz phrased it much better than I ever could, but he
> > basically pointed at the "Power Off". You can also read the release
> > notes for loads of other changes
> 
> this is all fine
> 
> BUT why are things completly re-written and in a pre-alpha state
> released replacing and destroying the users workload and after
> that it takes years to fix all teh issues in the one or another way?

I have a totally different view.

Could you show me the bugreport about where GNOME destroyed something on
a users machine?

GNOME 3 was delayed by 2 cycles. Before that we made loads of releases
available for testing. The 3.0 was really stable.

> this big mistakes are happening over and over and the speed
> these are happening is growing with each compontent instead
> learn from mistakes and release software after it is finished
> or do not make a rewrite at all

Conflicts with release early and release often and the difference
between testing by 50 people and releasing it for 500.000+.

> it does users not help much if 2-3 years later things starting
> to get useable again - why? because in the meantime someone
> is changing the next subsystem against a pre-alpha and years
> later people are proud to have fixed a lot of issues while
> forget that they all were introduced by release unready software

That was addressed by Vincent during FOSDEM.

I mean:
- real usability testing (help welcome!)
  I mean huge groups, non-biased, representing everyone, etc
- real studies on biggest issues (help welcome!)
  I don't mean an internet survey, or a study where the outcome is 'do
  what some other OS does'. I mean something which is a followup on what
  Sun did ages ago.
- better communication (help welcome!)
  Sometimes a huge difference to what is decided/planned and what news
  sites announce

e.g. the poweroff I wanted to see changed more quickly. It could've, but
a study would've sped it up greatly. I mean a huge usability study at
least every 2 years, and smaller ones after each release.

This to address the difference between:
- one developer working on something
- a few developers (project gets a few developers)
- 50+ developers (jhbuild people)
- 500+ people (tarballs/unstable packages)
- 5000+? people (beta cycle - 3.x.0)
- nothing
- 500.000+? (distro release)

Every time the number of people increases 10-fold, you'll find more
issues. Expecting that a few developers will ever release something that
would be good enough for 500.000 is just unrealistic.

-- 
Regards,
Olav