Default Desktop Experience for 11.04

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad]

On 11 April 2011 13:22, Scott Ritchie <scott at open-vote.org> wrote:
[snip]
> I think it's the height of arrogance for us to tell a user that we're
> going to deliberately break his application because it wasn't updated to
> use our new indicator library.  "Still working the way it used to" is a
> reasonable fall back.

I don't agree with that, actually. It feels strange saying that,
because I'm really for long-lasting software. But sometimes, you just
have to break compatibility if you want to achieve something big. If
the discussion was about removing support for the old notification
area icons in gnome-panel, I would agree. That would be really
arrogant since people actually use and depend upon it. But this is new
software and everyone agrees that those icons are something to dispose
of. Do we really want to keep polluting the environment just in order
to be backwards compatible? That doesn't seem wise to me.

I don't think it's arrogant to be zealous in the pursuit to disable
bad ideas from polluting our work environment. Sometimes bad ideas
have to be actively discouraged if we want to have progress. There is
nothing to prevent an application from supporting both the old ways
and the new ones. There is no conflict. There is no problem.
Certainly, it is not arrogant to have visions that becomes goals, to
set standards and to hold them dear.

If anything, I'd like more of that in the freedesktop world of ours.

Jo-Erlend Schinstad