Gnome really needs help with their typography (and design in general).
Gradients, docks and shiny icons do not make a well designed product.
It's clear to see it suffers from the curse of open source software – design by committee, and the featuritis that results from that. There's often "flashy" chrome in OSS, but no solid interactions behind to back it up.
It's equally important what you choose to leave out from your product, as what you include. It seems Gnome has included the kitchen sink.
UI fading into the background. Working things around so that there are fewer User preferences. Default desktop themes which are sober and not overly jazzy.
Why should you be able to change themes or fonts? OS X (iOS as well and I think Windows Phone 7, too) doesn't allow you to do that. Those two don't seem like required features to me.
I used to change themes a lot back in the day ; now I just wish for a usable desktop that doesn't get in my way, and Gnome / KDE are awful from that point of view.
That's the reason why I'm developing software on Linux, but dual-boot in a Windows 7 partition for design-related work, as that requires mouse-based interactions, and in Gnome I can't even rely on copy/paste to work properly.
Changing themes and fonts is nice, but shouldn't be a priority. For me priorities would be having basic functionality, like copy/paste, working properly; or how about a task-switching applet (activated on alt-tab) that can use the mouse to select the window you want; or desktop notification windows that you can close (those notifications in Ubuntu are really obnoxious) ... this has always been the story of the Linux desktop for me, i.e. death by a thousand cuts.
For me priorities would be having basic
functionality, like copy/paste, working properly
It really should work. Since ages. Care to elaborate where copy and paste doesn't work in Gnome? Cause that's really a bug.
or how about a task-switching applet (activated
on alt-tab) that can use the mouse to select the
window you want;
You can do that with Gnome 3. Press Alt-Tab, hold down Alt and click around to your app. Works like a charm here.
or desktop notification windows that you can
close (those notifications in Ubuntu are really
obnoxious)
In Gnome 3 (and also Gnome 2 fwiw) you can close the notifications by clicking on them. But even better, in Gnome 3 you can set yourself as busy (click on your name in the top-right corner and select "Busy") so notifications will stay silent in the hidden notification area and won't disturb you.
It really should work. Since ages. Care
to elaborate where copy and paste doesn't
work in Gnome?
Copy something in one app, close it, then try pasting in another app -- sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, depending on the app or on its mood, and this behavior has been going on for ages, up until Ubuntu 10.10, which I'm using.
I'm happy to find that Gnome 3 has usability improvements. I'll definitely try it out.
I don't know what I'm confused about, and I don't really care about technical details -- the behavior of copy/paste has been inconsistent to me.
Reading that article, if it really is the reason for what is happening, it kind of makes sense, but that's no comfort to me when I'm losing my selection because I have closed the origin; behavior that isn't even consistent across apps.
I understand. I only use a Mac because I get a simple, consistent desktop that works right out of the box. Still, the user should have the ability to at least change the default fonts and UI color. Some people might prefer larger fonts, others might find too many colors in the UI distracting.
Winkey+w or winkey+e allows you to choose a window or desktop by mouse clicking. Copy/paste used to suck, but with newer ubuntu versions it works well for me. Notifications are not nice, I agree with you.
Unfortunately I have disabled Compiz because for some reason the NVidia drivers are hanging my computer when I'm shutting down -- and now after I switched to Nouveau, my screen doesn't light up when waking up from sleep.
And without those effects enabled, the show-all-windows shortcuts won't work.
And some would like to change the way the OS stacks windows, et cetera, et cetera. Picking great defaults is good enough for the vast majority of users, you don't have to waste your time implemnting ever more preferences and can focus on the important stuff.
Many people do desire the feature to change themes. A big reason to choose open source in the first place is the flexibility in customization that it brings. It's the opposite of the "Apple mindset" that there's one good way and that's the Steve way.
I think the problem in the past has been that developers in general (commercial as well as open source) have chosen to build 'flexibility' and 'customisation' over thinking user interface design through, making a decision about the way something should work and sticking with it. It's a somewhat rational response to bikeshedding: if you can't please all the users, make it configurable and let the users indulge in bikeshedding to their hearts' content - just keep it outside of the source tree. Thankfully the ascendency of good user interface design on the web and in successful consumer products (notably, though not exclusively, from Apple) has started to place value on clean, well thought-out user interfaces.
I think one of the things that Gnome has achieved over the years is removing lots of configuration options, and battling the hostile responses of a vocal minority who would choose complexity for everyone so that they can tweak any minor detail. Remember the backlash when Gnome replaced Sawfish with Metacity as its default window manager, and users could no longer script the window manager in a dialect of Lisp?
I'm all for options to personalise the user interface where it make sense, but if I have to start configuring your software in order to make it usable for the job it's supposed to be designed for, you've failed.
I certainly agree with you there. Customization is important but the first priority of a program is that people should be able to do their work productively without changing any setting.
There's also fine-grained customization versus "themes". Themes do allow people to give their own feel to a device/program/site, without them having to worry about individual settings.
I've always been a proponent of the idea that fine-grained customization should be possible, but you can hide it (this is what GNOME does). Just don't make it illegal to customize for the people that really want to (this is where Apple seems to be going; I don't want to break laws to make a device do what I want).
Edit: I happy when they introduces Metacity in place of Sawfish. Sawfish was simply too complex for its own good, GNOME had taken over most of the window manager duties itself and thus the wm should simply manage windows and get out the way.
Many people do desire the feature to change themes.
Do they?
A big reason to choose open source in the first place is the flexibility in customization that it brings. It's the opposite of the "Apple mindset" that there's one good way and that's the Steve way.
I think you are mischaracterizing Apple’s mindset. It’s not about finding the one good way, it’s about finding a good way and the assumption that most people are not interested in tweaking that.
I do not think that all open source projects have to slavishly follow some sort of central ideology of maximum customization. There are enough alternatives to Gnome that it would be no problem at all for Gnome to be different. For those who really need it crazy customizability is certainly available.
Yes, the Apple mindset assumes that there is a good way and people are not interested in tweaking that. You can agree or disagree with that.
I do agree that a sane set of defaults is good. It should be usable without customization.
But for one, I am interested in tweaking things. From the operating system to how things look. That's why I use open source. Isn't that the original hacker spirit?
It is but various Open Source projects do want to cater to many more people than just hackers. There are several open source desktop environments, they don’t all have to have hackers as their target group, have they? Just looking at Gnome’s website I would argue that maybe Gnome just isn’t for you and that there is nothing wrong with that.
You can tell that by just looking at Gnome's website?
I've been using Gnome for >10 years now. I've never had any big complaints about it (well except for gedit not having a "replace in selection" feature, but there's a plugin for that). Gnome has excellent customization and theming facilities through GTK themes.
I also think the Gnome defaults are pretty good. I've also used KDE and like it but tend to choose Gnome as I'm used to it.
Apple, however, I wouldn't buy because it locks me in too much for my taste. I don't like cages, even cosy golden ones :)
I think the reason that open source software is so often poorly designed is this committee approach where no one person can lead the design team. Strong leadership is extremely important when designing a good UI and I feel a lot of open source projects forget this.
Also this leader needs to be thick skinned and self confident enough to take criticism from others on the project but also assert their own subjective views.
Leadership is one issue. Another one is that the big Linux companies (Novell and Redhat) make most of their money from the enterprise market. So there isnt significant desktop design expenditure because the revenue slice from the Linux desktop market is vanishingly small. Canonical is trying to change this.
As an aside - www.enlightenment.org is one project which has had pretty strong leadership (Raster is a great programmer and also has good aesthetic sensibilities). I hope enlightenment comes back and the big two (KDE and Gnome) becomes the big four (kde, gnome, ubuntus take on gnome and enlightenment).
The problem with the Enlightenment guys (as I understood) is that they always had big plans and awesome ideas, but there's just not many enough of them to implement everything they want.
They might consider to simply take the good parts of KDE/Gnome and build a visual shell around it to their liking. Kind of like what Canonical is doing.
Gradients, docks and shiny icons do not make a well designed product.
It's clear to see it suffers from the curse of open source software – design by committee, and the featuritis that results from that. There's often "flashy" chrome in OSS, but no solid interactions behind to back it up.
It's equally important what you choose to leave out from your product, as what you include. It seems Gnome has included the kitchen sink.