It almost feels like there’s a wall between the community and the users of what this community produces. Which is weird. We are an open community, with open development, no barriers for new contributors – and yet, there is such a distance between the community of users and the community of developers/designers/outreachers/etc.
From the outside, it definitely feels like the GNOME community has its own particular vision and intended user-base, and isn’t much interested in feedback or criticism from outside that target demographic, which (again, from outside) I’d guess is non-technical end-users of Free Software operating systems. I suspect this is a build-it-and-they-will-come type play, and I truly hope GNOME succeeds, but it shouldn’t be a surprise that such a project gets little constructive feedback and involvement from traditional highly-technical users.
(disclosure: I’ve been a happy user of GNOME for browsing/email/music/light development work since 3.0, but when I need to Get Stuff Done I have a custom GNOME/i3 hybrid I’d much rather use)
Your quote from the article and comment reminds me of a 2003 rant from Jamie Zawinski: The CADT Model, complaining about Luis Villa closing jwz’s Gnome 1.x unresolved bug reports as a consequence of Gnome 2.x being released.
If we rewound the history of open desktop software, after my proverbial pony, I would wish ~GNU had focused on reimplementing the then non-GPL Qt widget library as free software.
From the outside, it definitely feels like the GNOME community has its own particular vision and intended user-base, and isn’t much interested in feedback or criticism from outside that target demographic, which (again, from outside) I’d guess is non-technical end-users of Free Software operating systems. I suspect this is a build-it-and-they-will-come type play, and I truly hope GNOME succeeds, but it shouldn’t be a surprise that such a project gets little constructive feedback and involvement from traditional highly-technical users.
(disclosure: I’ve been a happy user of GNOME for browsing/email/music/light development work since 3.0, but when I need to Get Stuff Done I have a custom GNOME/i3 hybrid I’d much rather use)
Your quote from the article and comment reminds me of a 2003 rant from Jamie Zawinski: The CADT Model, complaining about Luis Villa closing jwz’s Gnome 1.x unresolved bug reports as a consequence of Gnome 2.x being released.
If we rewound the history of open desktop software, after my proverbial pony, I would wish ~GNU had focused on reimplementing the then non-GPL Qt widget library as free software.