Fedora - time to blink

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Sun, 2011-11-27 at 22:47 +0800, Ian Chapman wrote:
> On 11/27/2011 05:56 AM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> 
> > KDE4.0 was released very early and it was underdeveloped at the time, which
> > was considered stupid by a lot of users. But there were no mistakes in
> > *design*, it just lacked configurability and features. This of course improved
> > over time, and today it is arguably better than KDE3.5 has ever been.
> 
> There were no mistakes in design? That's all well and good but people 
> can't use a product that isn't there yet. I honestly don't understand 
> why there's a trend to drop an older version of a product, release a 
> next generation version which does *less* than the older version. And 
> they wonder why people bitch about it?

Indeed - I'd call that claim as much of a bad decision as saying there
were no design decisions in KDE4. The fact is there were - and still are
- design and feature/function issues in *both* KDE and Gnome, many of
which were done by well-meaning, but clearly misguided developers who
don't understand or empathize well with the actual user experience.

> Or why I have to press Alt + RMB to pop up a menu on a panel in Gnome? 
> Seriously, WTF?

RMB on the window's title bar produces the same pop-up menu. It's only
when you want to do that from another location on the window that
Alt-RMB is required.

I just upgraded my mom's computer from F14 to F16 on Friday. It was a
total mess. The Nouveau drivers were impressively unstable with her EVGA
nVidia card. It only took several tries - with as many reboots - to get
the nVidia drivers packaged from RPM Fusion to work.

Once the system video was reasonably stable, I spent about 30 minutes
teaching my mother where everything had been moved to in going from
Gnome 2 to Gnome 3. Had she been left to her own, she would have been
ready to throw the entire thing out!!! On average, things that took her
2 mouse-clicks to do on Gnome 2 now take:

mouse gesture + mouse click + wait several seconds + mouse click + mouse
scroll + mouse click

Who in their right mind as a user experience engineer calls this
progress?

I spent more time customizing her Gnome 3 desktop to make things easier
for her than I did installing the system! Even then, not all of the
extensions are necessarily what I would call stable since several of
them will crash Gnome at login (the famous "Oh, no! Something has gone
wrong!" screen). The worst culprit right now seems to be the alternate
status menu extension that puts a shutdown button back on the user menu.

This has been the poorest quality distro launch of Fedora I have ever
seen - and I've used this distro since FC1, and the old RHL before
that!!!

Alan Cox is right, there needs to be a lot of attention paid to
stability and user experience with respect to updates to F16, and for at
least the next two releases...

Chris


-- 

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"If you have integrity, nothing else matters.
If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters."

--Harvey Mackay