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KDE mi GNOME mu?

Klasik soruya güzel bir cevap. Linus Torvalds`ın sözlerini aktarıyorum.

Torvalds: `Use KDE` Google Tercümesi(Anlıyabilene)

I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.

This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of 
Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will 
use it. I don`t use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long 
since reached the point where it simply doesn`t do what I need it to do.

Please, just tell people to use KDE. 

> That`s definitely not a point of view of the GNOME Project - we`re focused
> on making Free Software appropriate for users who are smart (we don`t talk
> about `dumb users`), but just don`t care about computing technology. We`re
> just like every other Free Software project - fixing stuff requires the work
> and attention of people who care about the problem at hand.

No. I`ve talked to people, and often your "fixes" are actually removing 
capabilities that you had, because they were "too confusing to the user".

That`s _not_ like any other open source project I know about. Gnome seems 
to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not 
doign something is not "it`s too complicated to do", but "it would confuse 
users".

The current example of "intentionally not listed in the printing dialog, 
the usability team of GNOME was against listing these options." is clearly 
not the exception, but the rule.

Jeff, if the explanation had been "exposing PPD features is too hard, we 
need developer manpower", I`d have understood. THAT is what open source 
projects tend to say. Not "powerful interfaces might confuse users and not 
look nice".

If this was a one-off, I`d buy it. But I`ve heard it too damn many times. 
And only ever from Gnome. 

The reason I don`t use Gnome: every single other window manager I know of 
is very powerfully extensible, where you can switch actions to different 
mouse buttons. Guess which one is not, because it might confuse the poor 
users? Here`s a hint: it`s not the small and fast one.

And when I tell people that, they tend to nod, and have some story of 
their own why they had a feature they used to use, but it was removed 
because it might have been confusing.

Same with the file dialog. Apparently it`s too "confusing" to let users 
just type the filename. So gnome forces you to do the icon selection 
thing, never mind that it`s a million times slower.

> Technical users often feel that a usable design can dumb down the interface.

No.

That`s not what I`m talking about at all.

When user interfaces means that something CANNOT BE DONE, it`s not about 
"usable design" any more. At that point, it`s about UNusable design.

Any Gnome people who argue that it`s about "usability" have their heads up 
their asses so far that it`s not funny. I`ve argued with them about this 
before, and I know others have too, and mostly given up.

"Usability" is an issue only if you can do something at all. But if you 
can`t do the thing at all, it`s pointless to talk about usability: the 
thing is BY DEFINITION not usable if it cannot be used for a specific 
task.

Then a person that claims that it`s usable for something else is a FUCKING 
IDIOT.

And in that FUCKING IDIOT vein:

> The majority of end-users want a simple printer dialog.

This is a great example of being a F.I.

There is no such thing as a "majority of end users" in general. For 
example, maybe _I_ am in what you _claim_ to be a majority, in that I 
want a simple printer dialog - because I have a simple printer, and 
even simpler printer needs.

So a simple printer dialog doesn`t bother me, and as such you can count me 
in your "majority".

But I can guarantee you one thing: the _vast_ majority of people are part 
of a specific minority when it comes to something. This is somethign that 
the F.I. "interface designers" in the Gnome sense seems to continually 
overlook.

For example, maybe I don`t care about printers. But I _do_ care about my 
mouse. If I can`t control the left/middle/right button actions, I get 
really upset. Again, the "majority" of people may not care, so by your 
majority argument, the mouse setup should be so simple that the majority 
of people can never get confused. But I _do_ care.

In other words: your "majority" argument is total and utter BULLSHIT. It 
can be true for any particular feature, but it`s simply not true in 
general. 

To put it in mathematical terms: "The Intersection of all Majorities is 
the empty set", or its corollary: "The Union of even the smallest 
minorities is the universal set".

It`s a total logical fallacy to think that the intersection of two 
majorities would still be a majority. It is pretty damn rare, in fact, 
because these things are absolutely not correlated.

And the technical term for somebody who claims to do user interface design 
and not understand this fact is a "FUCKING IDIOT".

And this has _nothing_ to do with "technical users". Even totally 
non-technical users care about something. In fact, it might be their 
printer, and having a way to set the paper type and resolution by hand. 

Another way of saying this: we`re _all_ "special" some way. We`re damn 
quirky, even the nontechnical among us.

But hey, just continue to remove all that confusing functionality from 
Gnome.  I don`t care. I voted with my feet.

> Kind of a truism there.  The interesting discussion is about how to
> implement software design in practice. The way you`re phrasing it, it
> sounds as if software without infinite/all-possible features all
> equally emphasized and accessible is somehow broken. You aren`t giving
> any kind of guideline for what to include or exclude or emphasize.[1]

Arguing by reductio-ad-absurdum is a known logical fallacy.  Yet you do 
it.

Taking _anything_ to the extreme is bad. And no, that`s not at all the way 
I was phrasing it, even if you`d like to put it that way just to be able 
to ignore my argument.

The thing that people were talking about were not in the least "all 
possible features". In fact, I explicitly pointed out that the feature _I_ 
find most irritating is one that EVERY SINGLE other WM implements. Except 
the default gnome one.

And the feature that started this discussion wasn`t some "infinite" or 
"all-possible" one. No, it was a feature that was mentioned as already 
being done by the KDE equivalent, and having been shot down by gnome 
people as being against "usability".

In other words, nobody expects gnome to be "infinitely flexible". 

What I (and everybody I`ve seen) are arguing for is that gnome should not 
be _less_ flexible than the alternatives.

Yet currently it clearly is. By a mile. Often the reason is quoted as 
being because of "usability". Preferably together with a high-and-mighty 
smirk about how technical people don`t understand it, and that nipples 
are intuitive.

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