unity-design team mailing list archive

[Martin Owens <doctormo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for your kind reply Mark,

On Thu, 2012-02-09 at 10:43 +0000, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> It's very easy to become so obsessed with a particular feature or
> option that we forget [the user's view]

I'd certainly not argue for obsession with particular options, nor any
obsession with the lack of options. I think that I've seen options added
when they need not be and options removed that ort to have been more
smartly combined into others.

> Remember how we started. We introduced, into a world of 11-CD Linux 
> installs, a version of Linux that came on ONE CD.
> That was called 'absolutely ridiculous'

Certainly not by me, I was using Gentoo and glad that I could install
Linux without compiling everything. Having a single CD made it easier to
advocate and still does, even though a lack of creative tools could be
limiting our users in hard to reach places like Africa, I'd not push us
to a DVD or multi-cd distribution because of that.

> Choices are very hard. So we have a good, balanced framework for how
> we make them, but we don't shy from making them.

Be bold! Be courageous! and be honest when you're taking a chance and
gambling on a hunch. The New Labour party had this same problem in
power. They'd be so focused on making the decision that they'd sometimes
forget the consideration step and further then didn't seem to think it
was important to widely publish those factors later. Leading to wide
spread mistrust of the decision making process and a feeling of
alienation for Unions and back bench MPs.

Decisions are great, having a receptive community that believes in them
is worth ten times more.

> If you've ever been in a UDS session where we are discussing Firefox
> vs Chromium

Fun sessions.

> It's a fallacy that the very smart people all 
> want every possible option, and that Ubuntu will lose all the smart 
> people.

Id' say it wasn't so much about the people. Odd as that sounds. And my
problem is expressing these ideas in words, so I've attached an image to
attempt to explain the way I'm thinking about the depth of an option.
The further away from the Canonical target we get, the deeper the
options need to go and which layer technically those splits happen in
and where we lay deliberate gaps for growth by others. Sometimes we want
options in the application, other times we want scripting and addon
support... and yet still sometimes we just want the desktop built on
frameworks that are easy enough to reorganise into radical designs.
That's an example of a very deep option.

The ultimate option is just to go to square one and build everything
from scratch. Not even Ubuntu did that.

> if it doesn't offer every possible option.

Then there is rarely any outside creative discovery. Mistakes are where
new things are born, bad mistakes are frequent and luck dictates where
good ideas crop up.

Basically we want Ubuntu to be as useful to the hum-drum as it could be
to the wide eyed experimenting maniac. Certain branches of
experimentation are at the moment... made harder by Unity. This doesn't
mean Unity should go or anything, it's just that it's no surprise that a
community we've created filled with users used to fiddling with the
knobs and playing with the buttons gets upset when the buttons have
turned into python scripts and the knobs are hard to read C programs.

Not all of that's the removal of options... some of that I think has
been a movement towards harder code with fewer points of entry for
scripts. APIs are design objectives and not naturally exposed on the off
chance someone will find it useful. Perhaps this is a symptom of the
high pressure to march forwards, I don't know.

> Who want Ubuntu to be on rails so they can be more 
> productive than their counterparts on MacOS

And that's great, but let us not weld Ubuntu to those rails eh. We've
got a lovely history of letting users in and opening up our processes,
code to uses not intended or dreamed of. We're better than MacOSX and
we've got a process for random experimentation that's inconceivable to
Apple.

> not just for themselves.

Given up on Enlightened Self Interest? Regardless, we know problems have
cropped up from advocates reporting issues. People who aren't thinking
of themselves, who do spend a lot of time with and thinking about their
users. For some reason Ubuntu's advocates don't really get any more say
despite their experience, kindness and heart. I'd say they get less
because they barely have the time to argue the point online with so much
to do in the real world for users.

Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10 have been real problems for me and my users. I
can easily fix my laptop, it's almost impossible to fix a user's opinion
of Ubuntu when say all graphics tablet support breaks in a stable
release. Hinting that these releases are unstable betas is not a lie I
can use with 12.04.

> what they want or they are going to use <*****> Linux

Yes but we're neither of us that person and not arguing for them at this
moment.

Best Regards, Martin Owens

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