People like to beat up on MS a lot, but the differences between the Windows 7 GUI (or iOS GUI) and Gnome 3 really highlight the disadvantage that a bunch of spare-time developers who say to themselves, "well, I think our users will like text truncation, let's throw it in tomorrow!" are at versus a big company with millions to spend on thoughtful UI design, graphics, research, and focus groups.
Windows 7 has its problems too, but it's clear to me that the changes Gnome 3 is bringing are nothing more than what some out-of-touch developers think is what users want, without having actually asked users. Maybe I'm wrong on that assertion but that sure is the feeling I'm getting from this project.
Gnome 3 would have benefited greatly from a series of focus groups before development started or from snagging a high-profile UI expert to rap them on the knuckles whenever they had a bright idea like using 12 different font colors, sizes, and styles on the already-overwhelming dashboard screen.
> Gnome 3 really highlight the disadvantage that a bunch of spare-time developers
You do realize you are criticizing the topmost user interface details of a theme of an extensively themable early release. I think those "spare-time developers" have been focusing their attention on the API changes that the Gnome 2 to 3 transition impose and the new concepts introduced by the shell. The core seems very good. What you complain about is usually addressed in the configuration files for the theme and the names of the shortcuts. Multi-lingual support will bring some additional problems that should be addressed in the coming weeks. There are many dozen different themes that are compatible with Gnome. All those will have to be tweaked to look right.
Have a little more faith, for just about every computer that is responsible for your internet access runs on top of software written by people you would call "part-time programmers".
I'd trust their work over the one from Microsoft's full-time employees anytime.
If they didn't want to invite criticism, they shouldn't have release screenshots of a product they don't want criticism of, complete with breathless captions about "beauty" and "usability."
Furthermore, I have better things to do with my time than spend time mucking around with configuration files and theme settings. Back in high school I had the time and inclination, and in fact I did so; now that I run a business, I'd rather spend that time doing actual development. Not to mention the moms and grandmas of the world who don't even know what a theme is. I, and they, need a UI that just works out of the box.
And finally, just about every computer that is responsible for my internet access runs on top of software written by large corporations who have hired people to develop for open source bodies. Let's not forget that it's for-profit companies with full-time programmers like Red Hat, Canonical, IBM, Intel, etc. that are more than partly responsible for the relatively wide enterprise (and desktop!) adoption of Linux today.
I'm not out to bash Gnome, Linux, or open source; I use Ubuntu on my work laptop every day. I criticize out of the desire to see the open source movement develop something better, and that means not patting everyone on the back just for "working hard." It's precisely that kind of "gold star for effort" attitude that lets crappy software exist.
> If they didn't want to invite criticism, they shouldn't have release screenshots of a product they don't want criticism of.
I am sure this will be a learning experience. It's alpha software, after all, and it is released in order to allow people to learn what works and what doesn't in the real world. As usual, with open-source, if you decide to use Gnome Shell right now, or in April, you'll be running the bleeding edge. I would say that, if you want to run it as stable software, you should wait until October. Open-source is developed in the open, as it invites intelligent criticism and grows stronger with it.
> Furthermore, I have better things to do with my time than spend time mucking around with configuration files and theme settings
Unless you want to design themes, you are not supposed to do that. I rarely do. I think I haven't done that since 2003 or so, and I was really going for a full customized desktop at the time. I did it because I wanted to do it.
> And finally, just about every computer that is responsible for my internet access runs on top of software written by large corporations who have hired people to develop for open source bodies.
I would like to point out a lot of Gnome has also been developed by a lot of full-time employees of for-profit companies too. It was you who called them "spare-time developers". I am not sure how it will play out with Novell's demise, but I trust other companies, like Red Hat and Canonical can chip in if needed.
> I'm not out to bash Gnome, Linux, or open source
I then certainly misread your post. I didn't realize you meant "spare-time developers" as a compliment. My bad. I am sure open-source has a lot to gain from the criticism of a bunch of spare-time experts.
"The vast majority (70 percent) of contributors work on the project on their spare time, while an additional 20 percent of contributors do so on both a paid and voluntary basis."
Adding the percentages of the top 5 corporate contributors adds up to just over a third of contributions from ostensibly full-time developers.
So it appears to be just a fact that people are developing this in their spare time. That doesn't mean they're less competent than paid developers; of course not. It simply means that compared to a big company, like MS or Apple, they just don't have the same level of cash money resources to hire the right kinds of people--UI design experts--and buy the right kinds of feedback--real-life user testing, focus groups--that big companies do. And that very much shows in these screenshots.
Alpha or not, criticism is essential for furthering the project. If everyone just sat around and said "whew, lots of hard work, good job guys!" to whatever crap any OSS dev produced, OSS would never progress. I want Gnome 3 to be better because I use Gnome every day!
Ahem, "The study found that some 70 percent of contributors are unpaid, but that the majority of commits comes from paid participants." I'm not sure what basis you used to decide that only developers employed at the top five companies count as paid developers.
Have you tried to, instead of calling them "spare-time developers", file a bug report or a feature request? Did you get involved in any design decision? Do you subscribe to whatever list Gnome Shell developers discuss their ideas?
Canonical has and pays UI design experts. I don't know if they're the best, but I remember going to a conference given by one of them a few years ago at the FOSDEM.
If the only outlet for your criticism is Hacker News, then I would argue that it's not very constructive criticism. You're saying that criticism is what will make the product better, but that only works if your audience can directly affect the outcome (e.g. GNOME developers/contributors).
I think there's no substitute for clued-in developers.
Focus groups produced the interface overhaul to Windows Vista and 7. Rather than building on an existing, successful interface, they decided to be more mac-like, and managed to make the interface prettier but much yet less usable in the process.
I agree, gnome fonts are yuck. Even in the screenshot on the frontpage the fonts look awful - both in the text document and the dropdown menu headings.
The problem with the fonts is more than just aesthetics. It's about gamma correction.
For various reasons, the brightness of an RGB color value is not linear. This means that a checkerboard of white/black pixels will not look the same from afar as solid 50% gray. The correct shade is something like ~75%.
When anti-aliasing crisp details such as letters, this is incredibly important. Without gamma correction, there will be a noticeable change in brightness when a shape lies between pixels vs when it is pixel-aligned.
I think this is why Linux geeks tend to be vehemently opposed to anti-aliasing; they don't realize the rendering method they're using is crap.
One interesting thing about the Gnome Shell design process is that it has been very open and responsive. Although there was a heavy focus on creating design principles up front, the actual design has evolved a lot over the few years that the project has been active. The overview of the current design at http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design has many relevant links that you can explore if you're interested.
One thing that concerns me is that they only decided to do usability testing in Feb 2010, but according to the Wiki page Gnome 3 has been in development since Jul 2008.
Shouldn't a huge UI overhaul receive incremental user testing to stamp out bad ideas before significant dev time is invested? After an alpha is delivered, does anyone really think that if one of their big paradigm changes is found to be disliked, that they will go in and remove or significantly change it? Maybe Gnome would, I don't know--but from my experience, once code is delivered in a semi-functioning state, it's very hard to overcome that inertia to make huge directional changes. (And perhaps no big change is needed--but from these screenshots I can say that so far I personally don't like the new direction.)
I think what's most unfortunate is that Linux desktop people follow MS' approach of integrating the windows managers and the graphic shell ever more closely.
This approach seems to requires a monolithic application.
I would imagine it could be more open-source-appropriate to separate out the Windows manager (in charge of the details of font and icons) and the shell (the taskbar, start-menu, explorer-type-application etc).
Caveat: I'm working on a shell-like project myself. I suppose I might feel some satisfaction to see Gnome get it wrong but I don't want to see a monolithic system that freezes out alternatives.
Is that a valid criticism though? I don't run a desktop, just a window manager (scrotwm), and I can still run KDE apps without having to load the entire KDE desktop environment. (Gnome I don't know about, as Slackware doesn't provide Gnome.)
Also, does 'shell' mean something specific to desktop people? What you detail as being the shell, I would call 'desktop'. But I could very well be out of touch with the current lingo.
Windows 7 has its problems too, but it's clear to me that the changes Gnome 3 is bringing are nothing more than what some out-of-touch developers think is what users want, without having actually asked users. Maybe I'm wrong on that assertion but that sure is the feeling I'm getting from this project.
Gnome 3 would have benefited greatly from a series of focus groups before development started or from snagging a high-profile UI expert to rap them on the knuckles whenever they had a bright idea like using 12 different font colors, sizes, and styles on the already-overwhelming dashboard screen.