"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:2005-07-06
Obviously I have nothing against Fred, but that is hearsay. This is my point, really - I've never actually heard a GNOME developer or a usability team member or whatever say "we're not doing it because it's too confusing". All you ever hear is someone else *saying* that they said that.
Member since:2006-12-24
If I recall correctly, it turned out that the specific basis for Linus' initial rant was based on misinformation.
Ah, I found it:
"""I'm just going to correct some things Till wrote that I would have said.
It seems either I didn't explained correctly, or Till misunderstood my
explanations (or probably a little of both) on what was the current
state of printing on GNOME and why full PPD options were not in GNOME
yet and why they probably would not go in it by just a snap of a finger
but only after careful interface reviewing. Thus the original message
was sent by Till on GNOME usability mailing list, to try to discuss how
to improve GNOME printing UI.
Thanks to Jeff, Alex and others, the real reasons on why GNOME printing
UI is currently lacking full PPD support have been exposed.
I'm still a little sad to see that a attempt to try to improve printing
support in GNOME and in Firefox/Thunderbird (so, for Desktop on Linux in
general) has been transformed into a gigantic flamewar for absolutely no
good reason, except exhausting electrons for carrying those emails 
Hopefully, things will be rolling in the good direction in the future,
with the Printing summit and each project initiatives.
--
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat@mandriva.com>
Mandriva"""
Found here: http://www.arcknowledge.com/gmane.comp.desktop.architects/2005-12/m...
Member since:
2005-09-10
Yeah, well, the entire issue started with this:
Today I talked with Frederic Crozat, GNOME packager/maintainer and
desktop developer here at Mandriva, and David Barth, vice president for
engineering, about the development of the printing dialogs in GNOME,
Firefox, and Thunderbird.
Frederic told that the options from the PPD file are intentionally mot
listed in the printing dialog, the usability team of GNOME was against
listing these options. They clutter the dialog and can be more confusing
than useful to the user.
But on the other side the user wants to make use of the full
functionality of his printer. He has payed for it.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-December/msg00019.htm...
This is where Linus piped in, making the by now famous "just use kde" remark. The post is funny in itself - shows how a simple feature request like this can be entangled in usability bureaucracy: instead of just adding it, and seeing how it works, there is this entire proposal of how it should be done, than there is mention of a usability conference when this should be discussed further, with no sight of actual code being written and tried out - it is not surprising that the always down to earth Linus was somewhat annoyed by this