[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

[Havoc Pennington]

Hi,

On 12/13/05, Linus Torvalds <torvalds at osdl.org> wrote:
> And the feature that started this discussion wasn't some "infinite" or
> "all-possible" one. No, it was a feature that was mentioned as already
> being done by the KDE equivalent, and having been shot down by gnome
> people as being against "usability".

Just to be pedantic for the record, when someone bothered to get the
real facts the feature in question was not shot down in the name of
usability.

Neither was the WM feature you brought up (and I can attest to that
one with 100% certainty since I would have done any shooting down that
did or did not happen)

> What I (and everybody I've seen) are arguing for is that gnome should not
> be _less_ flexible than the alternatives.

Is your proposed guideline here that if any alternative OS/WM has a
feature, GNOME has to have it? If not, which "flexibilities" do you
consider important? How do you decide? That's the guideline I'm asking
you to think about and suggest here.

> Yet currently it clearly is. By a mile. Often the reason is quoted as
> being because of "usability". Preferably together with a high-and-mighty
> smirk about how technical people don't understand it, and that nipples
> are intuitive.

You're bringing in the mysterious "they" again. If there are specific
people saying specific things, then point out who and what. So far
every specific example we've chased down (file selector location
entry, print dialog PPD, configurable WM buttons) has had a different
backstory than this stuff about "usability"/"confusing to idiots" you
mention.

Havoc