Ramblings and questions regarding Fedora, but stemming from gnome-software and desktop environments

[Alexander Ploumistos]

2014-12-29 14:10 GMT+02:00 Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net>:

> that's why i call it harmful try to hide the shell from users
>

Well, to be fair nobody is trying to hide the shell and GNOME terminal has
received some love in the latest releases. Package suggestions in the
terminal can be useful for beginners and for advanced users, who don't want
to do the "yum whatprovides */foo" and "yum install bar" dance. It can't
stop you from dancing, though.

When I was 3 years old, I learned to type mechanically BRUN SABOTAGE (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabotage_%28video_game%29), later at school we
learned Logo, so I was conditioned from an early age to textual interfaces.
Then came System 6 and a few years later, windows 95. Until GNOME 3,
perhaps with the exception of Enlightenment, every "mainstream" DE was a
retake of that paradigm. Sure, with every iteration they became much more
functional and polished, but GNOME 3 was the first that pushed me out of my
comfort zone. I had to get acquainted with conky (yet another silver
lining) and up to the time that the first gnome extensions came out, I had
a little trouble getting things done. I got used to it though and with time
I came to appreciate it. Granted, it's certainly not suited for every
machine and perhaps not for every user, particularly those whose brains
have been hardwired with time to a certain modus operandi. It might also
need some tweaking to get it to one's taste, but that has always been the
case with every DE. Every new release brings huge improvements over the
last one and I'd say that from 3.6 onwards, there is nothing I miss from
version 2.

What amazes me, is that novice computer users find their way around GNOME's
UIs quite easily (more easily than I did anyway), which means that the
Human Interface Guidelines do work. People who had only used windows very
few times in the past, started getting things done in under an hour. Sure,
they didn't need to monitor the health of their RAID10 arrays, or the
processes that generate traffic on eth3, but that is absolutely possible as
well.

I still have a couple of minor complaints. The first is that there is a
chasm between the configuration options that are offered in the UI and
those in Gsettings, or between Tweak Tool and CSS/JavaScript, if you want
to tweak the UI itself. I think there is some room for something like an
"advanced view" in the Settings panel. The second is about the combination
of GNOME and Fedora, in that at times it feels like the interface pulls in
one direction and the underlying system pulls in the opposite. But this
constant change keeps one on one's toes and that's why we use Fedora, is it
not? Constantly crying wolf, only makes it harder to notice when the wolf
is actually on our doorstep.
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