2009/10/21 Paulo J. S. Silva
<pjssilva@xxxxxxxxxx>
In my humble opinion this is one of best ways to end a conversation:
takes your "opponent" point of view and turn it into a caricature that
make it sound unreasonable.
Well, I thing exposing the weaknesses in other people's argumentation is at the core of any real debate. I'm not trying to say that he's completely unreasonable (he isn't indeed!), I'm only implying that his argument is not as community-oriented as he may like to make it sound.
As far as I can see Owens point is that we don't need such a radical
"one size fits it all" minding set because that is not really possible
in all cases. One size does not fit it all always. I don't think that
everybody else that asked for customizations wanted
"my-customized-to-the-last-pixel-way-or-the-highway". Usually we ( I
have already asked for customization in this list) want a way-out from
what we consider bad UI decisions that are really making our life
worse when using Ubuntu.
While it is true that one size cannot fit everyone, when dealing with UI, it is surprising how certain sizes can actually fit incredibly large numbers of people. Almost by principle, customization detracts from finding such a sweet spot. This is why good designers try their best to avoid it.
For example in the osd-notify positioning, adding the possibility of
selecting one of the corners would be enough. It would be certainly
enough also to hide such option requiring gconf-editor to change it.
This would be enough for you, of course, because you would just fire gconf-editor, change the option, and never think of the problem again. I think Mark's point was to avoid precisely this, and I agree with that entirely. By adding the option, we're just dodging the problem, not solving it.
Can't we just see that in some cases it is *really hard* if not
impossible to find a default setting that would not step on many
peoples toes and add a gconf-entry to select it? If an UI decision,
for example, generates a bug reports with hundreds of comments it may
be a good indication that the decision is not good for a very large
number of people even if it is good for most of the people. Then we
can work really hard to find the best default setting without really
left part of our community behind.
Changes to a user interface almost always
cause some irritation at the beginning. Most users just live with that,
because they don't have another option, but we computer experts know
better. We can fiddle with the computer, so our tendency is to look for
the option that lets us put the thing back where it used to be and
forget about it.
I bet that most of the people who are complaining now are reacting precisely like this. They see the change, sort of don't like it, look for the give-me-back-my-old-environment option, and become pretty much upset when they don't find it. Their next step is to log into Launchpad as quickly as their fingers permit. I bet that most people who aren't computer experts wouldn't bother at all about notifications slightly changing their position. Actually, most of them won't even notice the change.
Now, that said, you are right in that options may be the right solution in some cases, but such cases are rarer than you think. Finding a proper solution is hard, and, in this case, it may take several further attempts to find something that works really well. It is just too early for giving up.
Cheers,
M. S.