unity-design team mailing list archive

[Mike Rooney <mrooney@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 5:49 AM, Angel Guzman Maeso<shakaran@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Ubuntu is a great distribution. Success is achieving progress in recent
> years thanks to the great community and the efforts of its developers.
> However, users are becoming more demanding and require the best possible
> results.
>
> With Notify OSD is doing a great job. Many of its features make it
> appreciate the great effort made in its development, as well as innovation
> in codification.
> But the requirement of users is present and ever louder calls. Users ask
> customize your system in a comfortable and enjoyable.
>
> Ubuntu is a distribution made by humans and for humans, we are all equal but
> different and so each person has their own tastes and needs to decide.
>
> It might be necessary to invest some effort needs to make tools for
> customization and configuration, and this shows a great appreciation of the
> users.
>

The main problem here, which Mark has hit upon in previous emails, is
that while more configuration sounds nice and simple in theory, it
creates buggy and inelegant applications. Each option added creates
another code path to develop, maintain, and test. Even a simple binary
checkbox theoretically doubles the the number of possible
configurations as you have all the possibilities you did before with
the option unchecked, and now that same number with the new option
checked. It can really be a drain on new features and overall quality,
which would be a disservice to users.

That said, users are different and some basic configuration options
can be beneficial. It is just a fine line on a slippery slope, and I
think there is a lot that can be done with good defaults and
intelligent behavior, instead of working around a lack thereof with
lots of configuration options.

-- 
Michael Rooney
mrooney@xxxxxxxxxx