Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

I think this bug report is an excellent example of how not to interact with your users.

1. Remove a long-existing feature without telling anyone, hidden in a minor update

2. A user reports it in a friendly and informative manner. Persch [dev] closes with a single word "No". That alone should make any user furious.

3. A discussion ensues with someone finally (and understandably) concluding that this was done intentionally. To which Mueller [dev] responds: "Please don't. Please give https://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct a read. And please consider that this bugzilla is not meant to be a discussion forum but rather a place where actual bugs are kept."

Holy crap, so we are to conclude that it was not done intentionally but it should not be fixed either and that nobody is supposed to complain because the developers' code of conduct states that they always mean well by definition.

4. Another user sheds light on the backstory by pretty much proving this was done on purpose (contradicting Mueller). To which a third developer responds indignantly that the "official" workaround for this issue is sufficient and that the user should head over to the corresponding wiki page and improve the workaround description. He then closes again with a statement about how all devs are well-meaning (just for the added cognitive dissonance I suppose).

What takes the cake: from reading their description, the suggested "workaround" seems to make the whole window transparent, including the terminal text.

Also, the original title of this thread was about a thousand times more informative.

Yes. This title changing business is infuriating.

It's probably a social experiment.

I agree. Changing titles decreases the quality of the submission since they are almost always uninformative and mundane compared to the originally submitted titles. And this thread is case in point.

Edit: I'm tempted to write a bot that will catch title changes and post the original title as a comment in the thread automatically.

I tried something like that once. HNers were not fans of novilty accounts, even a useful one that added content like yours would.

Though, I'd be in favor of you trying and seeing the result. My test was limited and short lived so it may not be indicative of the full community.

The bot which automatically posted links to previous submissions of the same URL was also received pretty poorly despite often being useful, so I wouldn't have high hopes.

You'll probably be shadow-banned; there's another dirty little HN secret. The moderation here is pretty horrifyingly bad.

I keep coming back to this idea (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5653878) of creating an API that stores the original titles and then just unleashing a GreaseMonkey scripts that compensates for editors that forget <h1> != story.

It makes sense to keep the titles of the original articles. Otherwise you would be open for complete rewording of the title, and passing of comments by poster. Let the content linked to speak for itself.

As for how this happens, I don't know? Is this a from moderators import title_checking ... But then Arc is more functional so maybe it is done in code?

In case anyone is curious, the title was "" Gnome 3.7 removes terminal transparency; closing bug with simply "No." ""

I recently found out that the guidelines explicitly say, "[barring exceptions] please use the original title". (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

I'm still sympathetic to the title-change complaints, and I think HN is leaving a source of creativity on the table to the community's detriment. But the guidelines are theirs to setup and enforce.

I assume that one of the motivations for this guideline is to prevent submitters from editorializing their submissions by altering the original titles (e.g. "Idiotic developers close perfectly reasonable bug report").

Yeah, I always thought the guidelines said, "Don't editorialize."

Gnome has always been this way. It's kind of sad, but if it was that way in 2006 and 2008 and 2010 it's hardly surprising that it's still that way in 2013. :/

In general, Gnome tends to make decisions internally and then refuse to communicate what's behind said decisions to the broader community.

That said, I don't think I agree with the people who seem to think of transparent terminals as massively important feature, though I do find them nice.

I'm with you. I'm not a Gnome user, nor is my terminal background (semi-)transparent. I just thought this was a great window into the attitude among the project's developers.

I often read discussions asking for designers to get involved in open source software, but maybe some PR folks are needed as well.

> I don't think I agree with the people who seem to think of transparent terminals as massively important feature, though I do find them nice.

I don't like transparent terminals myself but the bottom line is that Linux users spend a lot of time in their terminal. Terminals are the #1 productivity tools for Linux. You just can't remove features from such tools willy nilly without consulting with your users.

On the other hand, http://www.gnome.org/ describes itself as:

"GNOME 3: Ease, comfort and control

GNOME 3 is an easy and elegant way to use your computer. It is designed to put you in control and bring freedom to everybody."

From that, I don't think they aim to support the group of users that "spend a lot of time in their terminal". They might even look forward to the day they manage to ship a system without a terminal.

If that's their stated goal, then they should just come out with it and let all of the users that spend a good majority of their time in terminals migrate to something else. I have a sneaking suspicion that GNOME usage would take a nosedive if they were to do this.

Honestly I don't think that would happen even if they plainly stated it. At this point the writing has been on the wall for years and yet the "power users" who would care about this still haven't switched. Whether it's Stockholm syndrome, or self-blaming, or "oh, that wouldn't happen to me" I don't know, but it's getting increasing harder to blame the GNOME devs... they've made their opinion very clear and they're the ones driving the ship.

If you're a passenger and you think you see icebergs you need to abandon ship, not whine with the Captain about where to steer.

> If you're a passenger and you think you see icebergs > you need to abandon ship, not whine with the Captain > about where to steer.

Really? Not even in the case you think the captain failed to notice the iceberg, and a simple heads up would save not only yours but all the other passengers' lives?

Nothing ot do with Gnome, I suppose, but this was a really bad analogy.

Perhaps I shouldn't have used "iceberg" as that implies some upcoming inevitable disaster, which I don't think is true of this situation. The GNOME devs could certainly end up very successful.

I happen to disagree with the course, but it's their right as developers to choose a different direction. At some point as a user you have to come to grips with the fact that their vision and yours have diverged. There are undoubtedly many other users who prefer this different direction and they can't all be right.

Find the boat going the direction you want to go and climb aboard and help out.

Linus wrote a few months ago that he'd switched to Xfce. Does he count as a power user?

Linus is pragmatic though. He'll switch when it's necessary. E.g. BitKeeper => git, KDE3.5 => GNOME, etc

BitKeeper -> git was a painful necessity when BitKeeper started to want money. It's switching to BitKeeper was pragmatism over hardcore open-source principles, a 'lesser evil'.

I have to learn more about KDE -> Gnome, since I remember it was the other way around :)

Really? In when Linus did his talk about git for Google Tech Talks, he explained that the reason they parted ways because many of the linux developers were taking issue to working in a non-libre environment, I seem to recall...

hmmm

here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

BitKeeper was non-libre for a long time, but they dropped the free-to-the-community version[1] which forced the move. Linus drew criticism for a long time over the usage of a non-libre version control system for the Linux kernel.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitkeeper#Pricing_change

If no one has ever read the backstory behind this it's actually a good tale.

There was more to the issue than BK simply deciding to drop the free version. The short story behind that one of the Samba authors helped force Free Software along in more ways than one!

I went and tried to find some information. Definitely worth a read! Thanks. Actually. I'm gonna post it as a story.

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-well-written-accounts-of-...

Yes indeed, before Linus used GNOME he used KDE.

He switched from KDE 3.5 to GNOME 2 series when we were dicking around with KDE 4.

Then GNOME started their own process of dicking around and Linus tried KDE 4 (including rotating all the Plasma widgets ;).

Not sure if he stuck there or ended up on XFCE though.

He's been complaining about GNOME for a long time. I guess either they got bad enough Xfce looked better, or he figured out how to get Xfce to do what he needed. https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/WTLyn7dqYoR https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/UkoAaLDpF4i And the first comment on https://plus.google.com/115250422803614415116/posts/KygiWsQc...

The terminal is a power-user feature. Unfortunately, there's too much fragile nonsense undergirding Linux to be able to do away with the CLI in the default install right now.

I think you are severely underestimating the number of people considering the CLI to be a feature.

Are you disagreeing with this:

  | The terminal is a power-user feature

I don't see any comment on the number of power users out there. Most of the people on this forum would probably be considered power users.

I think you have to look at the actual market: Linux is primarily used by people who are power users; I'd go so far as to say that the vast majority of people using Linux are power users, and that the reason they switched to Linux in the first place was specifically because they were power users, and Linux catered to them better.

Now, the best software projects on Linux, ones that had previously been creating software that power users liked, and which became important at all because of the power users that switched over to using it, have apparently decided that power users are a minority segment of the overall market and that they are no longer worth optimizing for.

To make this clear: imagine if Windows, which currently is marketing itself to the "average computer user segment", a user segment that by-and-large were humans with some large subset of eyes, hands, and ears, and decided that the real money in the future was going to be branching out to take over the "any organism of any form" market.

Of course, that market has no real use for a keyboard or a mouse, as the majority of organisms don't have fingers. They can't see the screen, and they probably can't even reason in symbols. So the entire user interface starts getting converted into some kind of EM sensitive yes/no detector that is mostly useful for doing simple arithmetic.

Would this be reasonable? Would the people who currently use Windows not find this ludicrous? This analogy is obviously downright insane, but frankly I think it covers the situation here really well: the people who care about Linux are power users, so by forsaking power users they are forsaking their entire existing market segment.

For a simpler analogy, that I think also nails the core of the problem here while seeming really awkward: imagine if ALL the worlds best manufacturers of semi-trucks decided that cars were more profitable, and so decided to start marketing their products to them, not just by adding amenities but by making them less useful as semi-trucks.

So, over time, new models stop taking diesel, they force a back seat into the front, they add an optional trunk, and one they they decide to just remove the option to hitch things to the back at all. Would this be sane? This may even make sense on some kind of long-term strategy to take over the car market, but their market doesn't want a car.

Here, then: yes, I would agree with "the terminal is a power-user feature", but it is missing the point entirely to then argue that "I don't see any comment on the number of power users out there" here: claiming something is a power-user feature in order to justify its removal is indicating "small market segment", but power users are the market segment.

There is a profoundly large number of people that prefer the CLI in every way shape or form for 99% of their computing needs.

They are the most absurdly productive and effective computer users I know and the most highly competent.

They can deal with thing abstractly and don't need to spatially visualize every type of manipulation on the screen.

The CLI allows you to create tiny on the fly programs, slicing and dicing small tools to do really useful things.

There is absolutely no way to do it quite as fast if you have to artistically draw the connections with a pointing device in a GUI.

"It is designed to put you in control and bring freedom to everybody."

That mantra should not just affect the product, it should be the way the whole project functions too.

How is it freedom if they decide that a feature I use is no longer relevant, necessary, chose to remove it and don't inform me about it? It also doesn't give me control, does it?

The whole behaviour of the devs on that thread is completely in-elegant, so much for that part.

I also fail to see how that mantra excludes users that do spend a lot of time in terminals? Don't we deserve nice and elegant things and to be brought control and freedom? They explicitly state everybody, that includes us terminal mungers.

Is it just me, or the quotation really sounds like some content-free marketing slogan?

How does removing functionality "put [me] in control" or "bring freedom"? It does exactly the opposite; it leaves me with less freedom and control.

It is designed to put you in control

Clearly their marketing crew aren't talking to their development crew.

My favourite failure is that one of the few options left to the user is setting a default viewer for videos. A setting which it subsequently ignores.

It's kind of ironic that a project with a non-transparent development process decides to remove transparency features in this manner.

Is it me or has comments 19-24 been deleted? I'm guessing that's where the Mueller response used to be, but I don't see anything.

I just looked at the bug again and it’s been sanitized. I commented 2 or 3 times in the linked bug to add backstory. Those comments are gone now. The attachment I added is still there.

Funny story, they banned me now because they think I submitted this HN story. I didn’t, I came here way later.

http://i.imgur.com/wCTh0MZ.png

Makes you think, doesn’t it? (The warnings refer to another bug a few months ago, where I tried to make another developer explain his removals, and good discussion and a full blog post resulted. All in all a good result. But still they said I was out of line because I named names)

It's like a North Korea of development. Any dissent, real or imaginary, and you're gone.

More like 1984. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Wow... that is so weak.

Their attitude makes me want to switch to another desktop even more so that the software itself.

> to add backstory.

Didn't you accuse them of intentionally mixing up commits to make the changes hard to reverse? Calling that adding backstory is dishonest and the comment was entirely inappropriate.

(Sincere apologies if I am mis-attributing this comment to you.)

Well, I added backstory, which extended two years before this unnecessary public outrage event. People were asking questions about where the code went. I explained there was no clear single commit and how to find where it was removed.

And then I overstepped and deduced that this may be assumed to be intentional, condering the backstory.

You might say that was inappropriate and I was banned with justification. But I’m a human too and this lack of proper communication frustrates me to no end. If the developer in question can be said to have a breaking point, I have one too.

None of this would have happened if the involved parties had a better standard of communication and of handling matters.

I empathize with your position, but I don't think it is fair to paint such a negative picture when the reality is, at worst, much less offensive.

Mueller wasn't saying that it wasn't done intentionally. He was saying not to assume that its removal had been maliciously hidden.

And this is why I haven't been running gnome since 2.2

Stuff like this seems to be endemic to the Gnome project. It helps explain the lack of direction the project has taken in the past 2 years. Gnome has suffered greatly in many ways because of this.

Past two years? Gnome has been messed up beyond belief for much longer than that. I used to strongly support Gnome, but these days I'm just happy Canonical largely do their own thing with Ubuntu (for now they happen to do stuff that gives me a better environment than Gnome, but I'm ready to jump if they start doing stupid stuff too).

Gnome is quickly making themselves obsolete.

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