Suggestion Next Release

[Dimi Paun]

On Sun, 2008-03-23 at 19:46 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> Depends on what I'm doing.  Here is a common scenario:
> 
> I open up the bookmark for the Samba share on the machine I do Fedora
> composes on.  That's a normal double click.  I then middle click
> through
> a couple folders to get to the top level compose dir.  Then it's a
> normal double click into the specific compose dir, and one of each of
> the arch folders, then middle click again into the iso/ dir.  That
> generally leaves me with a folder for the composes, a folder for the
> arches, and a folder for the isos all open, so that I can go back and
> look at other arches, or other composes easily.  Also the windows all
> open in convenient locations so that each is viewable and don't
> overlap.

Great, but your scenario would work the same or better (depending on the
depth of your tree) if you had to Shift-DblClick to open a new window.
And it would have the huge advantage of not violating the principle of
least surprise in that right now for vast majority of newbies (read
users used to Windows), you have to do something special just to perform
a seemingly trivial operation.

Folks, I'm not sure people understand what a brutal experience it is for
someone to switch to Linux: there are problems left-right-and-center [1]
For a newbie that has battled recreating their work environment for
hours or days, the last thing they want is to be shown how clueless they
are because they can't even browse to the files the way they were used
to! We are just shooting ourselves in the foot, for seemingly no good
purpose.

[1] This is not an attack on anybody. We've made great strides in the
last few years, and it shows. Quite a few people should be extremely
proud of the results. But we're not out of the woods. I've recently
migrated my wife's Laptop (ThinkPag X60) to Linux. The first part
was so easy and nice it was a revelation: parted and installing Fedora.
These steps were so nice that she remarked on how smooth everything
went. But past that it was a bloody nightmare, trying to recreate
her working environment: flash+sound problems, Evolution bugs, Palm
synchronization, Bluetooth, etc.

We spent the entire day together trying to get it to work, and by
1am she was crying her eyes out in frustration and desperation. It
was sad, and despite my best efforts I couldn't help her. It took
another 2 days of fscking around with ppp and all sorts of weird
daemons, and enlisting the help of one of my kernel-hacking friends
just to get her Palm to sync! Brutal doesn't even begin to describe it. 

-- 
Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com>
Lattica, Inc.