[lugm.org] Linus Torvalds finds GNOME 3.4 to be a "total user experience design failure"

[Yasir MX]

Torvalds has long disliked the GNOME 3.x family. But, as Torvalds explained in his Google+ posting on GNOME 3.4:

I broke down, and upgraded my old aging Fedora
 install on my desktop. Simply because my old F14 comes with ancient X 
versions that don’t contain all the fixes to make Intel 3D really work 
well. And yes, things really do work better on the graphical side.
But with F17 comes gnome3. And I 
knew I’d have trouble, but also knew that most of the worst crap could 
be fixed with extensions, and I’d used 3.4 on my laptop enough to know 
it should be all somewhat usable.

Torvalds had had enough with the GNOME Shell Extensions way of “fixing” GNOME.

I have to say, I used to think that the “extensions.gnome.org” 
approach to fixing the deficiencies in gnome3 was really cool. It made 
me go “Ahh, now I can fix the problems I had”.
But it turns out to be a major pain, when it 
basically ends up as a really magical way to customize your desktop, 
which breaks randomly and has no sane way to do across machines. And the
 extensions seem to randomly break when you update the system, so they 
don’t work as well as they would if they just came with the base system.
End result: extensions.gnome.org may be a really cool idea, but it 
seems to have some serious usability problems in practice. And the whole
 gnome3 approach of “by default we don’t give you even the most basic 
tools to fix things, but you can hack around things with unofficial 
extensions” seems to be a total UX (user experience design) failure.



Later on in the resulting discussion, several people suggest that 
Torvalds just use the GNOME 3.4 keyboard shortcuts. Torvalds was not 
amused.

I’m really tired of the f*cking old “just use the keyboard shortcuts”
 crap. Sure, if you’re a keyboarding person, then gnome3 is a big 
improvement. But dammit, if you’re like me, and you write using the keyboard, and then use mousing for other operations, gnome3 is just not doing the right thing.
And what irritates me is how the gnome3 fanboys (and more 
importantly, developers), seem to never acknowledge that different 
people have different tastes. The whole “we know best” thing is a 
disease.
I’m really not that odd. I want a few things:
 - smaller fonts (especially window decorations)

- sane “start new terminal” without multiple steps from the panel

- auto-hide the panel so that I don’t have to feel “all emo all the time”

- focus-follows-mouse

- the ability to use a few default flags for certain programs
and the fact is that none of the above are “odd” requests, but for 
some unknown reasons gnome makes these fundamental things really 
inconvenient and hard to find.
And christ people - stop telling me about gnome-tweak-tool. I know .
 I mentioned the damn thing in the post, for chissake! Telling me about 
the tweak tool just shows that you didn’t even bother to read what I 
wrote.
I have found how to do all of the above things - except for the 
“flags for favorite applications” - but the fact is, the gnome 
extensions are not reliable and the UX sucks.


full article @ http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-34-to-be-a-total-user-experience-design-failure/11127?tag=nl.e539


 		 	   		  
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