What next?

[Enrico Scholz]

thacker at math.cornell.edu (John Thacker) writes:

> Having lots of different keyboard shortcuts that differ across programs
> is annoying for users, especially casual users.  Since GNOME stresses
> usability,

The "usability" stressed by Gnome2 is the usability expected by novice
Windoze users seeing Linux the first time. For experienced users, Gnome2
has a horrible usability: with every new minor version they make a 180
degree turn[1] without providing a transitition. Examples? The spastic
windowmode of nautilus appeared suddenly in existing installations
without a way to use the old one, the Emacs style bindings were suddenly
turned off in favor of the windoze like ones (and there are only hidden
ways to use the old one), a good webbrowser was replaced by something
with an experimental bookmarking which was never proved to be usefully
(and this thing still resists in ages of Firefox...), a powerful
windowmanager was replaced by a crippled something which is unable to do
the simplest things.

Perhaps, the "features" mentioned above could be provided in parallel
to the existing ones. But removing suddenly the old ones is the wrong
way. (FWIW, that's why I use KDE for my family; I am tired to explain
on every update why the old things do not work anymore).


> it encourages common keyboard shortcuts.

The "common shortcuts" are probably the Emacs style ones (e.g. they are
used by *Emacs, bash and old versions of Gnome). I do not see a reason
why they could not be patched into Ooffice; RH is crippl^Wpatching other
programs (e.g. firefox) already, so Ooffice could become a little bit
more Unix-style also.




Enrico

Footnotes: 
[1] they are very good in inventing new dimensions of unusability so do
    not expected to reach the old direction ever
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 480 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20050605/50341ea6/attachment-0002.bin