Glynn has set up a “GNOME Wall” at LCA for people to say what sucks or rocks about GNOME (or just to give suggestions on). It started a little slowly, so I accosted various people and wrote down whatever interesting things they said to try and “seed” the wall. The conversations where enlightening.
- When you talk about “The Desktop” (or “GNOME” or “KDE”) people only think about the panel and the window manager. They barely even associate the file manager with that term. Forget about the other apps we say are part of our desktop.
- There is a group of people who really miss funky features like being able to drag windows between virtual desktops. We already knew we lost them at the 2.0 transition. However they do try coming back every now and again. They also don’t like instant-apply.
- There is a group of people who have never used GNOME simply because they have never seen any reason to leave KDE.
- The default “two-panel” layout seems to be very popular. I suspect that this is because it allows people to put a lot of crap in their panels and screen sizes are big enough these days for it not to be a losing thing.
- Observation over peoples shoulders show a lot of people using GNOME. A surprisingly high proportion if you are to believe the various online polls that Jeff keeps referring to.