Comment by pekk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pekk | Hacker News Reader

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No affiliation with Gnome or any desktop project here, so don't blame them if you disagree with me.

The people complaining when they're upset do not necessarily represent everybody. Actually the people who are so vocal as to post the same bug 8 times and tar the project on Hacker News with lots of misrepresentations of what happened are probably not the most helpful to the community. Let those determine the direction of a project and you will continuously add features without any technical direction until it becomes bloated, a nightmare to fix or extend, and the only tastes served are this one bitter, vocal minority that becomes your entire community.

Maybe you should buy a commercial OS and try complaining to the salesmen, see how much they will charge you to ensure that arbitrary custom feature X ends up in the next release.

I'm fully aware of this. But the definition of a feature is "a bug with seniority".

Transparent terminals are a feature that they used to have. I've used that feature myself so that I'd be constantly looking at my daughter's happy face rather than the blank background of my many terminals. No utilitarian purpose? Perhaps. But a very real psychological one!

In fact this is valuable enough to people who spend time in terminals that even commercial OSs that you disparage, like OS X, have realized this is a valuable feature to include. So have the providers of other terminals.

But Gnome developers don't see things this way. They have a theory of what is utilitarian for their users, and that is the direction that they pursue. In the process they consistently ignore actual feedback from actual users, and completely devalue the psychological needs of their own users. This is a great attitude if you are designing a jail. Not so great if you are designing something for humans.

The craziness started more than 10 years ago when Havoc Pennington declared himself as the "usability expert" by writing this article:

http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html

Excerpt:

> On hearing that preferences have a cost, some people get upset that we're going to remove every preference, or that their favorite one is gone, or whatever.

Sometimes I think the problem with Gnome is that the cost for them to do anything is just too high, due to bad architecture. Thus they always opt to do less. This is in contrast with KDE's approach, where they strive to improve the architecture, so that it is easier to do more.

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