> I very much feel there is a trend in interface design to favour the > new/occasional user, even when it will inconvenience the experienced > "power user".
I think exactly the opposite, TBH. All this "searching for the application" presupposes that the user knows what the app is called. It doesn't help much to search for one thing if you're actually after something else. My favourite music player is called "amarok", although I've heard others like "totem". My PDF viewer is called "evince"... The point of menu-based desktops is that they are discoverable; you know where to start, and you can follow your hunt for an app by way of a sequence of classifications. Removing this means that the user needs prior knowledge before he can get to his goal. I see both Gnome3 and Unity as a serious own-goal. With Windows8 making exactly the same cock-up, we could really have pushed Linux desktops over the next few years. But absolutely none of the newbies I've tried on Gnome3 can cope with it, whereas only one has balked at Gnome2, so for this to happen, we now need a mainstream distro that doesn't ship Gnome3 or Unity. That means neither Fedora[1] or Ubuntu :-( Vic. [1] Having said that, I'm writing this post on a machine running Gnome2 on Fedora 16. But it's a non-trivial route to get to that point, and not something you can just download from the Fedora website :-( -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
