Why I left GNOME

There's a heated discussion going on over on Planet Debian currently about how Galeon 1.3.x dropped a lot of configuration items as compared to Galeon 1.2.x, and how this is disappointing some of the more advanced users. The claim is that by dropping some of the more advanced features, you won't scare off novice or casual users who don't know what all those thing actualy mean.

This is all backed by usability test such as one done by Sun, in which people who've never used the system before are put in front of a GNOME desktop, are being asked to do a few things with the system, and their progress on that is monitored; also, they're being interviewed afterwards, so that they can give their opinion.

While such work is probably tremendously important to make sure the system is useful for those who don't use it all that often, it's horribly important that you don't forget that such people do not make up the majority of your users. Creating a system that's tremendously useful for people who only use it for ten minutes in their whole life but tells advanced users to go fuck themselves and delve into some obscure and hardly documented gconf-tool frobnitz if they want their email program to stop making sound if they get new mail is horrible. Having a website that links to all sorts of community and developer information, but doesn't even have a fucking 'documentation' link on the front page (or on any of the pages linked to from that page, except the 'Developers' one which contains links to developer documentation) is completely and utterly useless. Someone once pointed me towards where the users' documentation is, but I forgot to bookmark it, and have lost the link.

Contrast to ion. Granted, I could start using GNOME a few minutes after I'd logged on (two minutes for GNOME to start up, five seconds for me to have a look at everything there and to start clicking away), and the same wasn't actually true for ion3. However, ion does point me towards its documentation with its very first message, and while I needed more than a few minutes to read it, I already had everything I needed: the manpage is concise, clear, and to-the-point; and down the bottom, there's a link to the ion website, which contains a 'Documentation' link in the second paragraph—the first paragraph being a short and concise explanation of what ion is.

Of all the bad things I've got to say about Windows, there's one thing I'll have to give them: at least they got it right that you shouldn't fucking mess with the registry. I don't know how gconf is supposed to work (even after googling for the documentation, and studying it as well as I could a while back), and I wouldn't call myself a novice user; so how is such a novice user then supposed to understand all this gconftool and gconf-editor whiz-bang-hoopla?

The main argument seems to be that this is wrong:

Which is a good point. But the solution that the GNOME people seem to push is not, in fact, a solution:

Because it misses at least this:

or, even better, this:

But, well. Since it's utterly clear that the GNOME people are not interested in anyone who's been using their system for more than 10 minutes, I guess the best thing to do is to use something else...