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Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

> You chose GNOME , the answer is you are not the target of the GNOME project, they target people with weak minds that would instantly faint if they see a configuration screen with options.

GNOME's problem is not the lack of configuration options, but lack of empathy. They stubbornly refuse to address (sometimes, even acknowledge) their own users' problems.

> If you decide you want options try KDE [...]

You don't solve this problem with more options. You solve it by understanding your users' needs.

I want a desktop that just works. KDE's promise is I can make it work if I can keep tweaking it; GNOME's promise is it should work if I'm willing to accept the compromises. Both of these options suck.

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Clearly desktop is too large a target to be solved effectively by a herd of cats. Lots of good intentions and half-standards, but no synergy or force to in darkness bind them.

I have been using Linux/Unix on desktop since the nineties, and while it has come a long way, it feels like that last 10-20 percent will never happen. It's that part that needs a manager with a large stick/carrot willing to make (informed) decisions and enforce them.

>GNOME's problem is not the lack of configuration options, but lack of empathy. They stubbornly refuse to address (sometimes, even acknowledge) their own users' problems.

I would agree that this is also a problem, so GNOME has many problems. But IMO is the big EGO s in charge that cause this lack of empathy.

I will disagree that you can get a Desktop that is perfect for everyone, Kubuntu or whatever KDE distro could do a survey and come with the most popular configuration by default but for sure it would be something like

What value you prefer for X ?

- 45% prefer A

- 25% prefer B

- 15% prefer C

- 5% prefer D

- the rest prefer E, F, G or H

so at best you have 45% happy users and 55% of users that need to change an option , but if you are an extremist of no options then you screw the 55%. And this is what GNOME did, they told their users that don\t like the feature removal or changes to leave.

> I will disagree that you can get a Desktop that is perfect for everyone

This is not the goal. The goal is to not suck. Design by survey is what got us here.

Spot on. Gnome is designed for non-existent user. All the while, worse than ignoring, denying actually existing user that have since moved on. Very sad story.

>The goal is to not suck.

But "suck" is some subjective thing, you will find a giant number of GNOME fans that will tell you how great GNOME is, how intuitive it is, and how you just need to give up your own preferences and embrace their UX guru ideas and it will not suck.

It seems that many people are in the "I don't want to think for myself camp" . unfortunately people in my family are also in that camp, never question if maybe there is a way to customize things to make the software more comfortable, they bend their body and minds, causing even distress to follow the defaults.

Something that obviously suck for us is normal for a GNOME user, in GNOME land there is only 1 way of working and if you don't like it you are asked to move on. many tried but you can't change those guys minds this is why there are tons of GNOME forks and probably no KDE fork.

You shouldn't need to "think for yourself" as a prerequisite to have usable tools. Your thinking energy is much better spent solving original problems or channeling your creativity.

Personally - I think KDE 3.5 (yes I'm that old) was near perfect. As of 4.x, they were prioritising adding the ability to freely hand-rotate desktop widgets (who the actual f8ck wants a skewed widget!?) over performance and stability. I could live with a useless feature, but I couldn't continue to run it on a computer with 256MB of memory, which was all I could afford back then. I can't remember what I switched to at the time, but I never came back.

>You shouldn't need to "think for yourself" as a prerequisite to have usable tools

This is not true, we are not all the same. For example my eyes are bad, and one is worse, so I prefer one side of the screen more, I want to put my important stuff like notifications on my good side, I do not need a pretend UX guru to tell me how to have my notifications and hard code them. I also prefer to change the keyboard layout around so I can do most used keyboard shortcuts comfortable with just my left hand. I don't care that the majority things the keyboard layout should look like, I am more comfortable in my way where a GNOME user will not even consider that it could be possible to customize the keyboard layout or change keyboard shortcuts, some big ego dude decided for them.

Let's assume you are right and defaults could be good for 99% but IMO are great only for 40%, I want great, not good or OK, but I don't want to force my preference on others , just wish others won't remove functionality because it is used by less then 50%.

EDIT: I think I might have misunderstood your point and my reply was offtopic, I assume that GNOME big EGO designer checks the touchspeed setting on his laptop, decides what is best for him and hardcodes it in, in their mind GNOME is usable and if you somehow disagree they will tell you to move on, they will never admit anything, they want to push out all the people that disagree with their vision and keep only the ones on the exact sam page with them on all the possible points.

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