Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 17th Feb 2007 18:59 UTC, submitted by elsewhere
"Some bad blood between Linus Torvalds and GNOME developers is flaring up again. Previously, Torvalds has said that Linux users should switch to KDE instead of GNOME because of the GNOME team's 'users are idiots' mentality. Now he has 'put his money where his mouth is' by submitting patches to GNOME in order to have it behave as he likes. This week, on the Linux Foundation's (formerly OSDL) Desktop Architects mailing list, the two sides are going mano a mano." Can I interest you in a pair of these and these?
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Member since:
2006-01-04
Why, oh, why is he telling users to stop using GNOME?
Fair enough if you like KDE, but I'm a developer and I use GNOME because I like the interface. I don't think it treats me like I'm an idiot, but rather treats me like I don't want to configure much and I'd prefer it just worked without changing any settings.
I don't have time to change all my settings and I like OS X for the same reason. Linus: If you like KDE, use KDE but don't claim that using GNOME is a bad thing. Maybe the reason GNOME isn't applying your patches or doing what you want is because they feel it's not important, other things are more important, or it's against their design philosophies.
I think they tend to be anti-new features because either:
- Most users won't use it
- It's visually overcomplicated (note this isn't saying that users are idiots, but rather that the human brain or some human brains doesn't cope so well with hundreds of elements and text onscreen)
- It is bad design
- Need to get it checked by usability testing or a debate on the mailing lists about whether it is a good feature
- New features = new bugs
If you have issues with the way GNOME does things... fork it or use KDE. At least try and convince GNOME to change their mind through mailing lists and such. Don't assume that because you don't like it, you are right and everyone should stop using it.