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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Googling with Middle Mouse Button (was:Re: Default
From:       Harijs Buss <hbush () apollo ! lv>
Date:       2003-12-06 15:04:41
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On Saturday 06 December 2003 15:41, Jorge Adriano Aires rakstija:

> > Mouse buttons are here to be used, no to be disabled. You certainly can
> > easily disable them for yourself but do not touch defaults!
>
> Because?

Because most people on this planet hate unexpected and unnecessary changes. 
Specially if something is taken off what was available by default.  This is 
big problem with KDE usability in particular and Linux usability in general: 
free software development is driven mostly by voluntary people who are eager 
to make changes, and they do. There is no (or almost no) conservative user 
viewpoint represented when decisions are made. Radical changes happening 
sometimes even between minor versions seem to be insignificant to 
super-power-guru-users (developers among them) but can seriously hurt average  
people who just barely managed to learn how to live with new (for them) Linux 
system.  In lists like this you see almost only views of "dominant minority" 
which is always easy to go and change everything "just for fun" ((C) Linus). 

The problem is that nowadays Linux is not anymore only a guru toy; now there 
are users "en masse" involved but they are never asked about changes.  
Opinions expressed here in this list should not be accepted as views of 
majority; they are not.  In fact maybe only few people in big Linux companies 
care and try to investigate what ordinary people like and what not when using 
Linux desktops. It is expensive too, to get such unbiased representative 
results about general usability.  Maybe some universities might ask their  
students to research e.g. KDE usability by average users and publish their 
results.  

But some principles can and shall be established anyway, like "don't touch 
defaults without critical necessity and even then think more than twice". 

KDE-neutral example: Mandrake always, up to 9.1 included by default console 
tool "Midnight Commander" (like FAR in Windows world, descendant of Norton) 
Commander).  In 9.2 MC was suddenly dropped from default list, as usually 
without any warning.  MC can still be marked in installation list if you 
happen to read it, or installed in addition later, but it is not anymore 
there by default. What happens is that non-presence of MC is discovered when 
graphical GUI doesn't work anymore, that is, when things are generally 
screwed up already.  Mandrake made a whooping 0.5 Megabyte economy on user's 
harddisk - NOT on distribution CD disk, because mc is still there!  Keeping 
in mind that typical Mandrake nowadays takes several Gigabytes on disk, I 
would call absence of default MC an unnecessary and annoying change. 

Thanks for reading ;-)

Harry

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