Unity

Bug #882274
Comment #8

Comment 8 for bug 882274

Revision history for this message

SRoesgen (s-roesgen) wrote on 2011-10-28:

@Tal Liron

I am sorry, if I was misunderstood by you. To say they are "hiding" behind their design decision was my way to describe that they do not deal with complaints uttered by the community and that they do not see any need to explain their decisions.

With "reasonable" I meant that most of the complaints, arguments, ideas and propositions given by the users in bug 668415 were very reasonable but any answer by those who make the (design) decisions was only that "it is a design decision" without any further (real) explanation. I never said that the community is not composed of reasonable people. Exactly that is my point: the community IS composed of reasonable people but I sometimes get the bad feeling that the dev teams do not take the community (us) for reasonable people. They do not take us for serious.

Concerning the aspect of us being biased fans.... I am afraid you are utterly right. I defended many of the ideas and concepts on which unity is based and always told people that it will certainly get better. Because Ubuntu has a good philosophy behind its concept and because all the years they released very good software composed of very good ideas. But due to the lack of transparency and dues to the lack of attention paid to the normal (community) users I became more and more angry and started to question whether there is any sense in defending design decisions which are never really explained to the community.

The funny thing is what happened, when I started to simply explain to users, who asked for certain aspects of the system and wanted to know if it is still "in development" and if it will be changed, that those things won't be changed due to design decisions. Those people looked at me and asked "why?" They did not think that any of the design decisions was reasonable and took it nearly for granted that this was work which was "still in development". But every time I brought that experience forward as an argument just to "rethink" the design I was rebuffed. Despite the fact that I elaborated on this user testings, on which the design decisions were based, several times, when I said that I have (had) a bigger user base to refer to, when it comes to describe experiences with users. I do not understand why the ubuntu devs do not at least take the experiences I made into account. This does only mean that I want somebody of the devs to listen. A reaction would suffice. A mature reasonable reaction. And if they do not want to change a feature, I only want a thorough explanation "why".

Just to shortly refer back to my beloved bug 668415 ;)
The biggest problem I now have with this bug is that we were recently told that suddenly the dev team is rethinking the positioning of the launcher. As there were problems with multi monitor support etc... Well, my problem: these issues were all discussed by the (community) users who told about those problems in the bug month before the Oneiric release. This is one of the situations when I feel treated like a small child and I suppose many other felt that way, too. We warned about those issues month before and the only answer to these reasonable concerns was: it is a design decision". Without any further explanation. And suddenly they can rethink their design decision.

@Tal Liron

The funny thing is what happened, when I started to simply explain to users, who asked for certain aspects of the system and wanted to know if it is still "in development" and if it will be changed, that those things won't be changed due to design decisions. Those people looked at me and asked "why?" They did not think that any of the design decisions was reasonable and took it nearly for granted that this was work which was "still in development".  But every time I brought that experience forward as an argument just to "rethink" the design I was rebuffed. Despite the fact that I elaborated on this user testings, on which the design decisions were based, several times, when I said that I have (had) a bigger user base to refer to, when it comes to describe experiences with users. I do not understand why the ubuntu devs do not at least take the experiences I made into account. This does only mean that I want somebody of the devs to listen. A reaction would suffice. A mature reasonable reaction. And if they do not want to change a feature, I only want a thorough explanation "why".

Just to shortly refer back to my beloved bug 668415 ;)
The biggest problem I now have with this bug is that we were recently told that suddenly the dev team is rethinking the positioning of the launcher. As there were problems with multi monitor support etc... Well, my problem: these  issues were all discussed by the (community) users who told about those problems in the bug month before the Oneiric release. This is one of the situations when I feel treated like a small child and I suppose many other felt that way, too. We warned about those issues month before and the only answer to these reasonable concerns was: it is a design decision". Without any further explanation. And suddenly they can rethink their design decision.