Free Software and Usability
Just as I was complaining to Igor about the attitude of the GNOME developers, I saw this article on slashdot. It's an article announcing the birth of the project GoneME, a possible fork of GNOME, meant to "take the project in a new direction".
While I have my doubts about the mileage this project will have, given it's "ranty" nature, I do think that it's about time for someone to step up an do something about the current state of affairs.
I have recently installed GNOME 2.6, switching from IceWM, and while I like the eye-candy a lot, I still have some issues with it. It seems to me that the GNOME developers thought that their software will only be used by beginners, so they took all kinds of decisions that should have been configurable (i.e. Button Order, Spatial Browsing, etc.). In my case, it was the Window List Applet that ticked me off, by not having any way to specify the maximum button size, and by sorting the windows in another order than chronological (i.e. older windows to the left).
No problem, I said, there should be an option, hidden somewhere in GConf. WRONG! The settings for the Window List Applet that can be found in GConf are exactly the same ones you can find in the preferences dialog. No "advanced preferences" here. Just sit back and relax, the GNOME developers know better than you how you should be using your desktop.
So, I started thinking of writing a patch to fix this problem. But before doing that, I thought I'd google a bit to see if I was the first one to have this particular wish. Well, what do you know? I'm not the first one to have this problem. A guy actually wrote the code to fix this issue, more than half a year ago. Did that patch get included in GNOME? No. "Why?" I hear you ask? Because that would "induce too many toggle buttons"...
Don't get me wrong here. I'm a huge fan of Havoc Pennington's work, and I think the UNIX Desktop owes him a whole lot of gratitude, but I think he should be less afraid of experimenting things. In this particular case, no one said that there should be a toggle button for this option. A GConf entry would have been just fine. If you care about this issue, dig for it.
A more general solution to the "GNOME Determination Problem" (as I call it) would be to add all these wild patches people ask for, but make them optional. If they are of dubious value, such as my pet bugfix was, they should be left in GConf. GConf should be modified to send a weekly/monthly/etc. report (with the user's consent, of course) to the GNOME developers, showing which keys were modified. If many users modify the same options, those settings should be promoted to the UI. These reports could also give a clue to the developers about what "sane defaults" actually means to the users.
Who knows, maybe someday GNOME will re-invent itself, and I won't be forced to classify their developers into "undecided" and "holier than thou"...
Comments?
