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Mark Shuttleworth wrote: Then I am afraid that you are going to lose a lot of interest from lots of people. I really do understand your intentions, and I think they are wonderful, but there is a happy medium. Microsoft has demonstrated that. MacOS has very poor customization, and my Mac friends suffer from it. My Windows friends are pretty happy with their ability to do basic customization, such as moving the start bar, changing colors, and other pretty neat things. My mac friends that have been experiencing Ubuntu are bothered by the inability to configure Notify-OSD, but they deal with it just like they deal with every other disappointment in customization for Mac. My Windows friends, on the other hand, think it's a monstrosity. Abhor it. Some have even removed it in favor of the older, uglier, less effective way. Of all my friends trying Ubuntu, only one is semi-proficient in computers. There's certainly a point in which you should stop just giving SO MANY OPTIONS to the users (this is why I do not use KDE), but this really is something that I think matters quite a bit. This is something that people are going to have to notice tens of times a day. If they don't like it, each bubble will just make them less and less happy. That's been happening to myself when I bug hunt for Karmic. And this is why I use Ubuntu - they care about quality, not potential quality. Fedora is always introducing these new and wonderful things, and they laugh at poor old Ubuntu for not being up to date, but when their massive kernel panics begin from a hasty adoption of Plymouth and KMS, it makes me grateful that there's an OS with head on shoulders. Thank you.First, we get much better collaboration and communication, and much better testing, if everyone is looking at the same experience. We found this with Ubuntu itself - we reduced the default application install set to a single app for each major function: one browser, one mail client, one word processor. That was controversial at the time - most distributions were competing on HOW MANY apps they could install in one go. Look at Firefox - The view is very customizable and flexible, yet remains an asset to the entire networking world, now. If someone doesn't like how it looks, you change it through the "view" preferences. You can do more with addons. But for those that just want to browse the web, you just click on the FF icon and start browsing. Notify-OSD's position is hardly something that could go massively wrong and start wreaking godzilla-havoc on the computer. Once the Preferences and Administration menu clutter gets better organized, then it'd hardly be a huge problem to have two preferences for Notify-OSD in a section below other display preferences. This is, after all, something the users have to look at a lot! It's like having no choice in the matter for what wrist you wear your watch, or what pocket you put your phone in.One of the great failings of the community approach is that it attracts folks who like to customise the environment to the point where it is "perfect for them", at which point they stop caring about the environment that the typical user sees. They run "the latest code from CVS" so they don't care about bugs in the stable version. They swap out components for things that are more interesting and then they have no visibility AT ALL on the pieces a new user sees. We will not make that mistake. In Ayatana, we'll take an opinionated stance, and we'll apply some common principles to the design process, and we'll live with the results. I have no interest whatsoever in making it possible for anybody to have any environment they want - we already have that. I'm interested in driving forwards to build a default out of the box experience which is as good as we can make it for the new, consumer user. Most people on this list are NOT a new, consumer user, so I'm afraid you will have to work hard to think from that perspective if you want your ideas to resonate here. That's a very strong statement. I guess I can see your viewpoint, and I think (though I hate it) that may be a reason that Apple has such a solid product - they only have ONE WAY. ....but, you know.... you can customize Growl.... ;) Mark -- -Brett Cornwall |