Aaron Rainbolt wrote:
> Still, one could make some case for this. Plasma is, for one, obviously
> going to be more familiar to newcomers to the Linux world simply by
> virtue of the fact that the paradigms presented by its initial
> configuration are more familiar to those coming from the Windows or
> ChromeOS worlds, and (hopefully) those paradigms aren't sufficiently
> different from MacOS to be too uncomfortable for a user coming from the
> Apple world.
You make a good point there. The thing is, GNOME tries really hard to design
for new users, whom they define as a user who has never before used a
computer. Such users are basically on the edge of extinction. A paradigm
that works great for someone seeing a computer for the first time in their
life does not necessarily work all that great for someone trained to use
different paradigms used in the operating system(s) they have used for
decades.
As you point out, for users switching from a different operating system,
which is a much more likely scenario, the GNOME Shell design is really
confusing and disruptive, and GNOME's reluctance to make it easy to switch
some things back (instead requiring you to install shell extensions for any
such change) does not help. Even if the other operating systems' patterns
happen to be counterintuitive if you have never seen them before, once
trained to them, you will not only be able to work efficiently with them,
but also be confused by GNOME's intuitive design that they carefully
usability-tested on people with little to no computer experience.
That leaves GNU/Linux power users who have used nothing but GNU/Linux for
decades. I am in that category, like many regulars of this mailing list.
(Well, I am particularly extreme in that even my smartphone runs GNU/Linux,
but that is a different story.) And I would argue that GNOME is also a very
bad default for users in that category because of its deliberate lack of
configurability. Not to mention that the same (concept familiarity) concerns
applying to people switching from other operating systems also apply to
people switching from any other GNU/Linux desktop environment. Personally,
when I tried GNOME 3 once, it took me less than 10 minutes to decide that
this is just completely unusable for me personally.
So I think it is pretty clear that we do NOT "have two equally good options"
as Adam Williamson wrote (in the post to which you were replying).
Kevin Kofler
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