For a user who is not a programmer, the investment of time required to learn the programming language, learn good programming practice, study the framework documentation, the codebase itself which changes faster than one can study it, and then write, debug, unit test and deploy the new feature, then learn how to push the final change upstream in source control, finally accepting criticism for the change and possibly having to redo the whole process, the total cost of entry is too high. Learning the language is a significant investment of time and energy in and of itself even if you're already a multilingual programmer. I know Ruby, perl, bash, c, c++, objective-c/++, and I'm learning Java and d and its still a significant challenge to learn a new language.
I submit to you for this very reason that if no-one has made it a feature or at least made it possible to do it much easier than writing it yourself, then they have not "allowed" reasonably for the users to do it. This isn't to suggest that a developer must allow the user to configure everything, but most things should be reasonably easy. It should be easy to move the launcher to the right or bottom, or turn it off in Leu of a replacement, as it stands, none of these options are provided by unity as written for distribution. There's a few things I think need reworked at the design phase for unity and the use of lightdm to make the user experience more acceptable for power users, but those are for another letter to the mailing list. The point is that just saying "well, it's open source/free software, write it yourself!" Is not good enough for end users of what is supposed to be a consumer product. It may be a great feature that the code is available for modification, but the vast majority to us users are not going to invest all the time, energy, and possibly even money to figure out how to write it ourselves and instead will wait for someone who already has the skill and knowhow to write it for us.
Den 02. nov. 2011 06:07, skrev anthropornis:I suspected that. Naturally, at least 98% of Canonical's new target demographic(s) is quite capable of editing the source.
You were talking about Canonical not giving their permission for you to have a feature. That is provocative since they grant you all rights to change anything you like in any of their products.
Certainly, if I had the know-how, I could just go create my own OS from scratch, build my own mobo from scratch, etc. This is Ubuntu, not Arch, and yes, everyone knows they can do everything themselves, whether it's their operating system, or changing their oil.But if you acknowledge that these things are not simple, then you must also realise that there is a limited number of people who are capable of doing these things. When Canonical pays these people to write software for you, they have to prioritise. And you asked for software to deactivate Canonicals software, didn't you? Does it make sense to you that something like that would have a high priority, if they even wanted to spend money on it at all?
By the way, I have never claimed that you should program stuff yourself.
In other words, Jo-Erlend Schinstad had nothing constructive to add. Why do people post such unhelpful
By the way, I have never claimed that you should program stuff yourself. I was simply pointing out that Canonical is not denying you anything, and when you say "Will Canonical ever permit the user to disable the launcher", you are implying that they are. I certainly didn't intend for this to become a discussion though.
Have a nice day.
Jo-Erlend Schinstad
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