unity-design team mailing list archive

[Gino Vincenzini <openmysourcecode@xxxxxxxxx>]

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.
On Nov 2, 2011 3:36 AM, "Jo-Erlend Schinstad" <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>  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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