Congrats on 11.04

[John Moser]

On 04/29/11 23:40, Bilal Akhtar wrote:
>
> Why GNOME3 didn't make it to 11.04 is a different story. There are a
> handful of Ubuntu Desktop developers who had to focus on Unity work. It
> would be difficult for Unity to be made on then-unstable GNOME3
> libraries and it would have been equally difficult for Desktop
> developers to focus on both unity and GNOME3. Hence the decision was
> made, to put up GNOME3 packages in a PPA for testers and ship Unity on
> top of GNOME2. The GNOME3 transitions were postponed to 11.10, when all
> GNOME3 packages would be in the official repos and Unity will also run
> on GNOME3.
>

Thanks, that actually helps.  Slashdot and other media are running with 
"Ubuntu has completely ejected GNOME3 and is splitting from GNOME" and all.

But all I got from this is "shipping an unfinished product to get 
testing in before it's ready; will fix in next release."

By the way, you will continuously be chasing the "non-technical users" 
for all time, as each attempt to make well-designed and sensible things 
"easy to understand" for people who can't get their brains around an 
interface that makes logical sense (people have a lot of ideas about how 
things work that are based on complete and total idiocy and glaring 
logical disconnects) will just make the stupid people progressively 
stupider.  Interfaces for non-technical people should be 
non-*technical*; that doesn't mean there isn't a learning curve.  You 
should see what I'm going through right now *learning to ride a bike*, 
I'm seriously considering classes.

It seems to me that gnome-shell was designed for people who tend to 
group and categorize things, rather than people who just want something 
to happen by some magic and don't particularly have a high enough level 
of brain activity to keep track of more than one thing at a time.  You 
know the type, the ones that close the word processor before opening 
"The Internet" because once they have 3 or 4 programs running they can't 
remember what they were doing with them anyway, and have to repeatedly 
dig through the task bar and figure out what order the tabs are in 
(rather than remembering where they were a moment ago and reflexively 
switching around).  This is also a developed skill, not an inherent 
property of human thought; notably, it is a USEFUL skill.

I guess the reason Unity takes the smart phone approach of 
non-differentiation between an application launcher and the application 
instance (i.e. the button to launch is the button to access the existing 
window as well; whether the application is running yet or not is not a 
concern, you do the same thing to get to it) is because people are 
inherently bad at instantiation.  There is no way you can ever grab a 
copy of a comb; there is only one comb.  I suppose someone could find it 
inobvious that you can run a program multiple times at once, figuring 
that once you run it it is "in use" and you can't run it again.

... until they get 3 file browser windows, or multiple windows in their 
e-mail application, or their Web browser, or whatnot.  Then it 
immediately becomes intuitive that you can run the same program multiple 
times (even if you really can't, for whatever reason), and that the 
"program" and the "window" are two different things.

I'm a strange one, if you end up talking to me.  I am inherently against 
oversimplifying things; but stuff has to be sensible and as simple as 
reasonably possible.  To me there is a balance in everything, and it has 
to be done "right".  I dislike both communism and capitalism; I dislike 
all extreme (liberal/conservative) political views; I wind up taking 
both sides in most theoretical/philosophical arguments, but pulling 
towards the center.

But I do get irritated by things.