rawhide report: 20050711 changes

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 7/11/05, Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com> wrote:
> Why? Out of the entire GNOME menu, that was the most useful feature
> by an order of magnitude (for me).

(for you)  sums it up.  Perhaps... just perhaps... you aren't inside
the target audience that Gnome is designing for. I too use the
terminal all the time. But you know what.... i know i'm not the target
audience that that GNOME is aiming their UI design towards.  I realize
what I do on a regular basis is well outside the curve for any
hypothetical user profile Gnome is using to design their UI.  Not only
that, but I also realize that my experience with Unix systems has
inspired an irrational craving for the cmdline. And I'm perfectly okay
with the fact that GNOME is not designed explicitly for me... because
it it was.. it would be a horrible unusable mess for 90% of the rest
of humanity.

My wife on the other hand, uses her GNOME desktop in a vastly
different way... a way that is probably is much more aligned with the
usage scenario the gnome developers are aiming their design towards. I
have never,ever....ever  seen her open up a terminal to do any
end-user task on her desktop.    The only time a terminal is opened up
on that fedora desktop is when something is misbehaving, and I stick
my nose in to try to diagnose the problem.

I think anyone with 3 working braincells who is making even a
half-hearted effort at keeping up with the momentum of gnome
development isn't terribly shocked at the change in the menu to remove
the terminal.  While sttupifyingly easy point-and-click access to a
terminal seems a worthwhile convience for the technically elite or for
the old unix dogs, a terminal certainly shouldn't be a prominently
placed tool for the target audience that Gnome is being  designed for.
  Its pretty brave of Gnome to actually say mainstream users of their
desktop do not need quick access to a terminal to get typical
workloads done... but I can't disagree with the goal. Mainstream
office and home users of a modern computer desktop environment should
not need to use the terminal so oftern that the terminal should be in
the main desktop menu.

>It is really sad that such important changes are taken in such a
>haphazard manner, sacrificing usefulness to some misguided grand
>vision of usability

This isn't an important change. You are talking about the removal of a
connivance feature to open up a terminal via a mouse click. C'mon....
lets be serious. The people who live inside a terminal can just as
easily use the provided keyboard shortcut mechanism to launch a
terminal. If anything its a bit ironic that terminal-junkies are
screaming about drop down desktop menus instead of screaming about
defining default keyboard shortcuts. Real terminal junkies never have
viewable desktop real estate to even get a right click menu.

-jef"card carrying member of Terminal Emulators Anonymous.... I can
stop using a terminal anytime a want to.. I just don't want to"spaleta



> It is really sad that such important changes are taken in such a
> haphazard manner, sacrificing usefulness to some misguided grand
> vision of usability.