Comment 9 for bug 882274

On 28/10/11 09:12, SRoesgen wrote:
> 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.

We cannot build an interface that supports every conceivable option that
any given user might want. We simply cannot. Not because we're too
selfish, or too stupid, or too uncaring, or too greedy, but because that
is not a reasonable goal. More importantly, trying to accommodate too
many different variants would result in a far buggier product, with far
less usability.

This is standard practice in professional development and design. It
means that there will always be some folk who think a given product is
suboptimal. If we spend too much energy on that, we reduce the energy we
have to spend on building things which will be appreciated by others.

I fully accept that Unity may not be for you. Then don't use it. On
Ubuntu you can choose Unity, KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and many others. You can
modify them to suit you.

If there is selfishness here, it's selfishness on the part of people who
DEMAND attention and offer no constructive solution. Nobody has a right
to expect someone else to devote their time to a mission in which they
have no interest. The Ubuntu community functions because we all have a
shared interest: to bring free software to the widest human audience. We
devote long hours, much more than any normal job, we devote after-hours
and volunteer time, to achieve this mission. And we have to take tough
choices, between what's going to grow the pool of users generally, and
what's going to please a smaller crowd.

Now, if I spent all day defending, explaining, and responding to every
request, we'd get nothing done. My time, and that of the people who
actually build Ubuntu all day and all night long, is focused on the next
problem, not the last one. By demanding continuous engagement on a
matter which is decided, a person is effectively putting their own
interests in front of the projects. Step back and think for a minute
about the opportunity in front of us - to bring free software to a much,
much wider audience. Is the thing you're demanding so important that it
should come before that? Have you figured out what you can offer in
exchange? Are you willing to do the work yourself?

> 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.

Within one day of the bug being reported, a senior Ubuntu developer and
I both commented. It's simply wrong to say that bug reports, complaints
and concerns are being ignored. Disagreement is not the same is ignoring
you; we just disagree.

> 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.

The dev team is not rethinking the position of the launcher, Tim spoke
in error.

Mark