FC3 Usability Problems

[Johnathan Bailes]

On Sat, 08 Jan 2005 13:11:38 -0800, Per Nystrom <centaur at netmagic.net> wrote:
> I just tried out FC3 last night, and I have a few rants to make about
> some of the key desktop features.  I know it's a testbed and to expect
> this kind of thing, so please just take it as constructive criticism.
> I'll continue to play with it and will eventually upgrade, but for now
> I'm going to stick with FC2 for my day-to-day needs.
> 
> 1.  Evolution
>         o Doesn't display some messages correctly.  To, From, and CC
>           headers are truncated; body is not rendered or only partially
>           rendered.  This happened in particular on several messages
>           with calendar appointments generated by Outlook.
>         o Slow as hell.  Took 3 hours (bogofilter can do it in about 5
>           minutes) for it to "learn" my list of about 4000 spam messages
>           for the junk feature.  Anyway, the junk feature itself feels
>           like a me-too effort that's unnecessary -- I'd rather plug in
>           a spam filter of my choice using the pipe to external program
>           feature in the incoming filters.
>         o Import from Evolution 1.x is not quite right.  It completely
>           forgot two of my mail accounts.  None of my filters pointed
>           to the correct locations of the new folder layout.

Not having either the display or the import problems but then again I
am not getting a ton of the Outlook calendar appointments either.  My
mail and accounts imported from Evolution fine.

I turned off the spam filter stuff in Evolution because quite simply
the pop retrieval times were too slow.

Yes, honestly this needs to be addressed.

> 
> 2.  Two desktop panels is one too many
>         o The new layout with the GIANORMOUS main menu drawer buttons is
>           ridiculous.  Use icons with hover popups to say "Applications"
>           and "Actions" -- don't spell them out in the panel!  

Honestly even with the big lettering they could easily go to one panel
but then again like alot of things in Gnome I like the look.  I hated
the MS-like one panel config where the panel size was so large in RH8
and 9.  I like the two thin panels.

Plus, its like when people complain that KDE is too XP-like by
default.  They are both kind of hokey arguements.  Yes, defaults
matter but my gosh it takes two seconds to remove a panel and the
menus to a thin bottom panel.

> 3.  Firefox
>         o I was completely unable to import my saved passwords from
>           Mozilla.  The File->Import dialog does absolutely nothing.
>           See this bug for details:
>           https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=140643
> 

As with the other person replying to the message later on I have to
say this is odd because all my passwords and account info came across.