Power-off stupidity remains in Gnome 3

[Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan]

On 06/15/2012 05:00 AM, Ian Malone wrote:

> I'm not actually entirely convinced. I do have a bugzilla account on
> Gnome, I can go and email the list there. However, the model where I
> decide (me and a few thousand other people) that I don't like one
> particular minor feature of Gnome and should go to their mailing list,
> sign up to send one email moaning about it and never show up again
> doesn't strike me as the best method. Fedora, it has been pointed out,
> is the distro that pushes new gnome. If the Fedora maintainers have a
> good relationship with gnome then perhaps they can more productively
> pass on the message 'actually our users have a big problem with this,
> please reconsider' than a horde of Fedora users descending on the
> gnome development list. Especially since the gnome people do sometimes
> seem to think individual users opinions a bit irrelevant.

It might be possible to get the Fedora developers to behave as user  
advocates before some other group of developers, though I don't think  
that this role is part of the job description of developer, nor  
otherwise natural to it.

Whether we have N users complaining here or N users complaining on the  
Gnome development list, we are still talking about N users  
complaining.  So it really isn't a choice of a bunch of users  
complaining here versus a solitary user complaining there.  Granted  
that an audience might irrationally discount N individual complaints,  
yet attend to a summary statistic from some third party; but they  
might also irrationally discount a summary statistic while being moved  
by N individual complaints.

However, as I noted in an earlier message, the Gnome shell developers  
designed shell 3 with the idea that users have been doing things the  
wrong way, as opposed to designing it in service to the way that users  
want to do things. (If you doubt that claim, then please review an  
archive of their mailing list.) This isn't simply a matter of not  
taking some particular user as unrepresentative; it is a matter of  
trying to re-engineer the typical user.  "Our users are unhappy with  
<behaviour>" would not seem to be a persuasive argument to them.

I'd be rather distressed were I to learn that the Fedora developers  
had a comfortable relationship with the Gnome developers.

> This list is a good place to discuss and say 'this works well on
> Fedora' or 'this doesn't work well on Fedora'.

Yes, but that's certainly not the same thing as seeking to have it  
modified for Fedora users.

> If there's no effective place to try and get Fedora fixed...

...then it might be time to change distributions.