I remember following the GNOME blog for some time and finally decided I'd never go back after the article on how gEdit was being "improved" by completely hiding the menubar, the toolbar and basically any usable controls. It was written such that "focus" and "distraction-free" computing was the ultimate goal and that UI controls were somehow "distracting".... The file open/save dialog involves multiple clicks before it is usable because obviously a path edit box is WAY too distracting...

I don't ever remember cursing my Windows 3.11 machine that the scrollbar and toolbar icons were distracting in File Manager, nor do I crash my car when the speedometer changes and wish that the distraction of the speedo and rev counter was removed.

I remember using GNOME2 and loving it.

I often wonder constitutes a "power user" - someone who wants to actually get stuff done and not fight the UI to discover things??

I wonder when iOS became the ideal - blindly fumble around whitespace to see if some text is actually a button or if there is some unfathomable control hidden that you need a magic incantation to discover (swipe left on a list control is delete - my mum still doesn't know this)?

Is a "power user" someone who has learned all the different ways of interacting with a modern user interface? You used to learn: click, double-click and scrollwheel. Now every interaction with a control is different and impossible to learn or discover simply by using it. Absymal.

What is a "power user?" Sounds like the same nonsense we hear from proprietary software vendors all the time, "That feature is for enterprise users."

Gnome more or less optimizes for minimal configurability, the theory being that most users want the UI to be as clean as possible. They do not particularly care if someone would like to be able to change some annoying behavior, because they thought that behavior made sense and they feel the cost of adding a button to disable it, or even burying a configuration bit in gconf, is far too high. Of course, they do not have the resources needed to run actual user studies the way Apple, Google, and Microsoft do, so their idea of what users want is mostly based on their own ideas about what users want (since they usually dismiss feature requests from their actual users, because those are "power users").

For example, GNOME doesn't support session save out of box. I think it's an incredibly helpful feature, especially for beginners - but maybe GNOME developers simply know that, deep down, all of us yearn for a clean blank slate whenever we restart our box, and showing the apps we've been using five minutes ago will only confuse our brain.

Also it doesn't even show hibernate button on the "start menu" (or whatever it's called these days) - because apparently the ability to actually power down the box while keeping all states is too confusing to have!