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LinuxPlanet: gnotebook: Nautilus Revisited: Unhappy Users Make All the Wrong Demands

“…Nautilus is less-than-optimal at this point, despite being a
product of good design and high promise. GNOME is back on a few
design points. GNOME 1.4 was wisely numbered, because my own use of
the release candidate and betas over the past few weeks reveals
that the changes it represents are incremental and not profoundly
apparent to end users. The talkbacks will be flooded, once GNOME
1.4 has been out in general circulation and the reviews are coming
in, with the inevitable lack of graciousness the end user camp will
display when given an opportunity to do what it does best, which is
post in talkbacks.”

“The answer, though, isn’t to demand Nautilus’ removal from
GNOME, or even to fork the project in a panicked attempt to make
the design trade-offs required to make it faster quicker. It’s a
good piece of software, it has a lot of promise, and its developers
have worked hard on it. It deserves more than to be rendered down
into gmc redux. It deserves the benefit of “Torvalds’ Law”, with an
active community of many eyes continuing to look at it, and many
fingers clicking ‘submit’ on its Bugzilla page.”

“I said the same thing about Mozilla I’ll say about Nautilus
here, which is that these projects require active, engaged user
communities to make things happen. Not carping whiners who’ve
staked their meager credibility in talkback pissing matches over
the desktop wars or daily harassment of the nearest Windows fan
they can lay hands on.”

Complete
Story

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