Default Desktop Experience for 11.04

[Sean McNamara]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 7:25 PM, Jo-Erlend Schinstad
<joerlend.schinstad at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Where is the empirical evidence that even a simple majority of users
would prefer not to have icons in their system tray? This kind of
decision seems like one of those things that's decided in a vacuum
with a lot of hand-waving and culture bias (asking your coworker, etc)
rather than a genuine conclusion involving a representative set of
opinions of real end-users out there.

It seems to me like an underlying motivation for the system tray to go
away mainly because they want more room on the top panel of Unity for
application menu items. If you have an app with 6 or 7 or 8 menus
(just try LibreOffice) on a reasonably small screen, the menus will
get cut off if you have bunches of system tray icons.

This is a really silly reason to want to get rid of a perfectly useful
feature of the operating system: we need more space for something
else? This makes no sense to me.

I like how Gnome3-Shell handles systray icons. They show up in the
bottom right if you hover your mouse near the bottom right corner of
the screen. This action of moving the mouse to make something pop up
is shared between Unity and Gnome-Shell, so I don't see why Unity
can't be made to do the same thing. The best part is that the icons
don't occupy a permanent part of your screen real estate (essential
for small screens); there is potential to make it "always show" with a
toggle or GSettings flag; and applications don't have to alter their
de facto systray icon practices at all. It's a win-win.

>
> 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.

This is the kind of thinking that got Rhythmbox to remove the 'stop'
button, and make it more convenient to type 'halt' into the root
console than shut down the computer using a GUI? No thanks.

Just my 2 cents.

Sean

>
> If anything, I'd like more of that in the freedesktop world of ours.
>
> Jo-Erlend Schinstad
>
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