On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 12:25, Alan Cox <[email protected]> wrote:

> > It would be like releasing a new car and then telling the buyer that the
> > tires that are included aren't good enough but that's okay because they
> are
> > free to go through the trouble of replacing them right after they take
> > ownership. Modularity is not a feature; a good feature is a feature.
>
> You wouldn't be a very good car salesman then would you ? In fact people
> loathe and hate the lock-ins wired into cars.


Please do not be hyperbolic; we aren't locking anyone in to anything except,
in this analogy, saying that putting a Hemi engine in a sub-compat is
outside the scope of our design goals.


> Plus of course the first
> thing anyone does when they get into a car is umm
>
>        Adjust the mirros
>        Adjust the seats
>        Adjust the music
>        Adjust the airconditioning
>        Adjust the satnav
>        Fit random personal objects (modularity)
>        ...
>

That's personalization, not customization, and is completely within the
scope of will be implemented in GNOME 3: themes, backgrounds, localization,
a11y, favorite launch items, etc. And has been said before, that's just the
beginning: by 3.2 we hope to have a well-defined extension API so that even
more *personalization* is possible.

"I'd like to use a random bluetooth hands free", "sorry our car is only
> available with our official hands free option"
>
> "radio", "ours only"
>
> "satnav", "ours only"
>
> "engine management", "ours only, DRM protected and we sued the other guys"
>
> "I need snow tyres", "sorry we don't support snow tyres, you don't need
> them."
>
> "I added go faster stripes" "You've voided the warranty"
>
> The car market is such a mind-numbingly bad example, in fact it's the very
> market whose abuse led the european union to pass legislation to limit
> the power of "no reverse engineering" clauses, that later proved such a
> good situation for software !
>

Fine, pick another analogy then. You got my point and now you're just going
off on a rant about cars.


> > If a user has to do a bunch of customization after installing to get
> > a tolerable desktop experience, we have failed at design.
>
> If the user can't then customise it to get a nice desktop experience to
> suit their needs after that you've also failed. That of course cuts both
> ways - it can have so much stuff you can't configure it.
>

You appear to have missed my point: if it's not a nice desktop experience to
begin with, it's too late. We are working on *that*, not asking the user to
do it for us.


> The distros gather hardware info with permission from plenty of users so
> they ought to be able to answer "what percentage of our users can run
> this stuff".


"Anything newer than 5 years old." Though we started saying that last Spring
so it's going to be 6 years old by the time we release this Spring--which is
longer than I've kept any computer.


> Not sure if they have enough data to do "what portion of our
> users desktops can be seamlessly migrated - ie all the equivalents for
> each applet exist and the settings can be mapped"
>

None, and that's a completely unrealistic expectation. We don't change the
UI paradigm and expect things to behave as they always have; that would be
by its very definition be the same paradigm.
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