Developer Experience

Adam Jackson ajax at redhat.com
Wed May 5 20:12:22 UTC 2010


On Wed, 2010-05-05 at 12:40 -0700, J. Greenlees wrote:

> Máirín Duffy wrote:
>
> > Having a choice available doesn't mean we get to shirk the
> > responsibility of picking sane defaults. Overwhelming the user, even if
> > they are a developer, with the equivalent of a 500-item questionnaire is
> > not really very considerate :( There is no lack of choice in free/open
> > source software. Part of the challenge of making it usable is filtering
> > those choices to the sanest / most useful / most frequently-used / most
> > widely-used.
> 
> B.S. You do NOT have a responsibility to STEAL CHOICES from users.
> You have a responsibility to give users choices, to follow the intent of 
> the FSF and GNU-GPL, the intent to promote freedom and choice.

Your sense of entitlement is pretty awesome.

Also, I think you don't understand the distinction between providing a
choice, and providing choices.  Fedora is one thing you can choose.
Fedora is not compelled to provide lots of choices.  Doing so not only
makes the process of developing Fedora more difficult and the result of
lower quality (cf. Mythical Man Month), it makes the user _less_ happy
(cf. The Paradox Of Choice, and The Design Of Everyday Things).

- ajax
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/attachments/20100505/8911193a/attachment.bin 


More information about the desktop mailing list