Hello, i will make this as short as can be. I am part owner of a small systems company. We do both residential and corporate systems, systems integrations, repairs etc. We tested Slab menu with nearly 100 people both residential and corporate. The corporate individuals had permissions from their employers for the test. We gave them a system with suse slab on it for one week. After three days the majority of the residential users gave their slab systems back. They all said about the same thing... " it is unusable, and slow to get to things" The people on business positions held out for the whole week Again, the response was that they liked the looks but it was slow to do work with. The employers of the people who tested this said "Had it not been known that this was a test , i would have fired the individual for not getting work done in time." i am not able to give you "empirical" data for this. Frankly i don't think it would help in convincing you not to use slab. i can tell you that it indeed reduces productivity by nearly two thirds in all of the people who tested slab. All i can hope for is that this decision did not come about because one of the Gnome developers said "Dudes! Did you see this Slab menu from Novell?" "wouldn't this be cool in Gnome?" Slab is a design "step backwards" concept. List driven menus are faster and easier to read. Category menus are rather 1st grade level thinking. "See spot. See Spot run"
Great if you are a 1st grader, bad if you plan do any kind of grown up work on a system running Gnome. If this were included in an operating system designed specifically for children I would be all for it. If you have ANY common sense about what is needed and what is the best for anyone using gnome you will not include this . If you are , however, one of the "typical" developers who don't care about the users, " I only write for myself" kind of outdated thinking, then please don't include this in the next final gnome. Put it into your gnome desktop, don't force this childish coloring book approach to menus creep into a grown-up's system. I am not trying to be offensive here, and I cannot see anyone being offended by this unless of course they did make the decision as I mentioned above. I have no great hopes in you changing your minds about this. From reading past articles about the useless, and inappropriate decisions made by the gnome-devel, i cannot expect that this letter will have any great impact on the final gnome. I can tell you we have contact with many programmers. I can say this with great confidence. If a gnome programmer has answered this question..."Why not have an option to turn slab off or on?" ,,, with "Do you know how hard it is to program that into gnome?" then there is the problem. New, Young, Modern programmers that we have contact with are more concerned about the use of their creations and the choices they include for the users. The older, or older school influenced programmers, believe somehow that the user is unimportant and only their creations count. So I hope that the majority of the programmers of Gnome do not fall into the latter outdated approach. All i can do is thank you for reading this letter. I do not expect, or require a response. However , please, take into consideration that the ONLY reason Gnome exists in the world, is because users use it! Please don't allow these irrational decisions force users, who genuinely love the logic and simple look of gnome run to KDE! By the way, the tests I mentioned above , were done over a long period of time. We don't have 100 systems to lend out. I assume you already figured that but thought you should know. thank you again and please no response!
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