rawhide report: 20050711 changes

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 7/12/05, Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com> wrote:
> This is a nice way to put it. We're nowhere close to "not require access
> to the terminal", and I can't possibly see how this helps anyone.

It helps.. because now... everyone who is relying on the terminal gets
to go back and try to make a list of reasons they are using a
terminal... or telling other people to use a terminal.. and categorize
the reasons why.

Is the action you are doing in a terminal.. simply because you are use
to the cmdline.. and refuse to actually use the desktop components?  I
know i open a terminal simply because I'm use to driving around my
filesystem in bash. This is not however something I expect normal
people to want to do.

Is the task a specialized system admin task that you would expect to
only perform as a trained admin or is this a typical task a home user
would be doing to admin their own stand-alone box?  configuring gfs is
clearly not something I would expect a novice to be able to do without
a terminal, nor would i expect a novice user/admin to need to screw
with it.

Is the task you are performing really a developer task?  

Or, are you opening a terminal explicitly to workaround perceived
brokenness or un-intuitive aspects of the desktop design?

This last category of items is really the big issue for me.  This list
of items here needs to be vanishingly small to make prominent location
of the terminal appear reasonable to me.
But I don't have perspective, I use a terminal for pretty much
everything.. well other than gmail.  I would be very interested in
knowing what people put in this last category, the "open a terminal
workaround perceived brokenness or un-intuitive aspects of the
desktop" category.
And to see what the plans are to resolve those specific items in the
gnome development plan.

> 
> Like it or not, but by and large the Linux audience is fairly technical,
> and they do use a terminal. Why make it harder for most of the users?

Because I do not believe panding to technical users, helps the mission
to serve a wider community.  Building a system that has defaults that
caters to the technical, is myopic. The technically inclined by
definition, know how to dig in and reconfigure.  Gnome's mission isn't
to optimize for the technical elite.  This is a rediculously minor
feature. The terminal isn't going away, its just not being given
special treatment anymore compared to other applications.  I would
however like to see a default keyboard shortcut pre-defined to launch
a terminal now that its not available via the right-click.  The
shortcut hook is there, but is undefined by default.

> 
> This is the sort of 'brave' move that reminds me (at a much smaller
> scale, I agree) to the spatial nautilus business. I haven't met a single
> person that wasn't upset by that change. And that was shoved down
> people's throats rather unceremoniously.

There will always be a group of people who are irrationally vocal
about any change. I wasn't upset by the change. In fact I've made an
effort to track my usage of spatial nautilus versus browser nautilus.
I set up one system each way.  Over a period of weeks I found I was
using  spatial nautilus far more than I use browser nautilus. On the
browser nautilus system I was still doing nearly all of my file system
operations via a terminal.  On the system with spatial nautilus i
actually started using nautilus more.  I'd love to be upset and shake
my fist at the change, but my usage patterns did actually change with
the introduction of spatial.

-jef"has no natural depth-perception"spaleta