Gnome User Survey

Posted by on October 27, 2011

Phoronix recently hosted a near Gnome User Survey, which surprised me, given Gnome Developers’ general “We know what’s best, bug off” attitude.

Then I read Bruce Byfield’s post on how Felipe Contreras suffered with Gnome Devs to help get the survey out the door, so to speak.

Give Bruce’s post a read, it’s worth it, but if you’d like a summarized version:


 

Rant, ,

12 Comments.

  1. Tomasz October 27, 2011 at 11:37 pm

    Yeah, like survey done on readers of internet tabloid has any meaningful results…

    • Nushio October 28, 2011 at 11:27 am

      It was hosted on Phoronix because Gnome refused to host it, because Gnome doesn’t want user feedback.

      • Brian October 29, 2011 at 4:18 pm

        Exactly right. People download their distros over the internet – I’m curious what other venue would be more suited for a survey. For the people at Gnome, I would guess that means an in-house survey, which means maybe they should keep their software in-house – period.

  2. Matruskan October 28, 2011 at 10:52 pm

    If “Users don’t know what they want”, why did they release something before it was finished? Just to hear users screaming and ignore them? If someone doesn’t care about what users think, one shouldn’t release anything, so users won’t criticize it…

    • Nushio October 29, 2011 at 12:34 am

      The problem here isn’t that Gnome 3′s “unfinished”, but that they keep trying to sell a Desktop that no sane user actually wants to use.

      • Frank November 1, 2011 at 2:44 am

        So you say I’m an insane user? :smile: I think you’re being more ignorant and less respectful to other people’s preferences than those you critize.

        • Nushio November 1, 2011 at 8:09 am

          I meant it tongue-in-cheek :P

          I know of about a half a dozen people who really like Gnome Shell, but an awful lot more that hate it

  3. James Cape October 29, 2011 at 10:05 pm

    I’m not (any longer) a GNOME developer, but I have had quite a few discussions with Fillipe, on Google+ and elsewhere. To put it mildly, he is a difficult person to have a reasonable conversation with. In particularly I’ve explained to him on several occasions:

    1. The difference between design and sociology
    2. The difference between sociology and what he’s doing

    He refused to listen to why a poll is not useful in design, nor is what he’s doing a poll worthy of the name—of course, the fact he didn’t even pretend to be disinterested in the results gave the game away: he’s looking for ammunition, not data.

    Oh, and just FYI, my ex-roommate from college stopped by earlier today to hang out. He’s going to upgrade his laptop to F16 from F14 after seeing G3.2 in action.

    Money quote (specifically about auto-managed workspaces): “Oh wow, that’s better than Mac.”

    • Nushio October 30, 2011 at 11:51 pm

      I’m glad that your roomate likes it. I have a couple of friends that also swear by Gnome 3,

      If the fallback mode wasn’t so back-asswards, I wouldn’t be so critical of Gnome 3, but here I am, bitterly posting this from KDE. All my laptops and desktops have switched to KDE, because I no longer consider Gnome a choice.

  5. Links 30/10/2011: GNOME 3.3.1, GNOME User Survey | Techrights - pingback on October 30, 2011 at 6:56 am
  6. TLM November 2, 2011 at 9:31 pm

    Exactly the reason I’m switching to mate once the Ubuntu PPA is done, XFCE and LXDE are nowhere near ready to be a default desktop for anyone. https://launchpad.net/~amanas/+archive/mate-desktop

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