Root Page Writings Why I Don't Use GNOME 2 June 14, 2004.
Check out this article: Opinion: Why Users Blame the Spatial Nautilus. It's about the latest and greatest from the GNOME team, GNOME 2.6, specifically its GUI file browser. It's a defence of how the default behaviour is to open up a new window when you open a directory (called spatial browsing). This is opposed to the way it's handled in, say, Windows Explorer, where the new directory opens in the same window, and the previous directory is no longer displayed. It is also a defence of the fact that the option to turn this off is deliberately hidden. The author, Radoslaw Sokol, is not one of the GNOME developers, but it is illustrative of how I feel they feel about me. I quote:
Think of your hard drive contents as of a desk full of drawers. Every time you put something into a drawer, you may be sure that the next time you open the same drawer it will be in the same place (and the drawer itself will remain in the same place). So, when you open a folder and try to locate a particular icon, it should be where you put it before. Simple?
This is why I don't use GNOME 2. Why are you telling me how I should think of my hard drive? I already have a mental concept of my hard drive, and it isn't files in drawers.
I haven't used a spatial file browser since my Apple IIGS. Why? I used 800 KB floppy diskettes for my Apple--no hard drive. There's not much you can fit on 800 KB, much less create a deep hierarchical directory structure for. I stopped using this paradigm when I started using DOS. Right from the get-go, you had the concept of the current directory, and moving from one directory to another. It came directly from Unix systems, with the PWD environment variable, which itself came from earlier systems with similar hierarchical disk organizations. The concept continued on into File Manager and Windows Explorer. (In Windows 95, the default was spatial. I, and most everybody else, turned that off as soon as we could.) When I switched to Linux, the same paradigm was dominant, in the command line, and in the GUI (which for me was GNOME 1.2). Why? Because all those systems have relatively massive secondary storage, with deep hierarchical directory structures. If you try to navigate them with a spatial browser, with one new window per directory level, you'll end up with tonnes of windows cluttered everywhere.
Clearly, there is a reason why non-spatial file browsers are used by most people. The author of the article simply claims that I've organized my files all wrong and that really I should only have a few files, in shallow directories. He then goes on to bemoan the fact that I have bad GUI-using habits (that don't match the default GNOME paradigm), and says that if I don't know how to use gconf, I have no business configuring GNOME. What arrogance! What bull! This sort of condescension is exactly what's wrong with GNOME 2. As I said, Sokol isn't one of them, but his attitude is one the GNOME 2 developers seem to have to me.
GNOME 1 was based around the principle that the main users are power users who like to tweak and twiddle things to their own satisfaction. GNOME 2 was based around the principle that the main users are idiots who need to be told how to do things, and who mustn't get at the configuration in case they screw it up. On their own machines. This view extends to every part of their interface. Hardly anything is configurable, without going into gconf, a Windows Registry-like construct. And it's not that they choose the most common settings for their configuration; they'll often choose their own idiosyncratic settings. While usually subtle changes from expectations, they can create problems, such as when there are ten new windows on the screen as you go down ten levels of directory structure.
Why do I care so much? I use KDE, after all. Well first, the condescension simply pisses me right off. Second, there's always the chance that KDE could die off, and I'd want to switch to something else; right now, the only candidate close enough in the functionality that I want is GNOME. Third, GNOME is the default window manager of many commercial distributions: this is what new users have to deal with. If they are turned off by it, it is a bad thing, since happy new users makes for more users of Linux which eventually makes for more Linux software. Fourth, it's what I may have to deal with if I work in a place that runs Linux but won't let me change the default window manager. So, even though I don't use it directly, it's still important enough to affect me indirectly. Fortunately, my view is shared not only by KDE users, but by many GNOME users as well, including some who have switched from one to the other.
I finally(!) read ESR's The Cathedral and the Bazaar yesterday. I think I can classify this as the Cathedral Effect, which seems unhealthily prevalent among GNU projects. By not listening to their userbase, or their potential userbase, and by implementing things for theoretical rather than practical reasons, their software is drifting from a general-use application to a specialized utility for them alone. If this drift does occur, they'll alienate their userbase, and lose all the benefits that go with it, and GNOME will disappear. Which would be sad, because there's some good stuff that I actually like in GNOME (this rant notwithstanding).
Or, to put it another way, the designers of GNOME 1 attempted to make a GUI that their users could configure to their needs. The designers of GNOME 2 will find it harder to make their users configure to the GUI's needs.
Root Page Writings Why I Don't Use GNOME 2