See, in the office where I work, we have this microwave oven. At first glance it seems like any other microwave, but then you try to use it. If you are trying to set the timer to one minute, it works well, just hit the 1 button and off it goes. If you are trying to set the timer to 2 minutes, it is just as good. If you are trying to set the timer to 3, 4, 5 or even 6 minutes you are golden. However, if you are so bold as to try and cook something for seven minutes... well that's just foolish, it will never work. Pushing the 7 button doesn't do anything. If you happen to notice you can't set the timer for 45 seconds either, because when you hit the 4 button, it starts cooking for 4 minutes. There is an add 30 seconds button which lets you tune the timer a bit, but there is no remove 30 seconds and no way to tune at smaller increments. There is no button you can push that takes it out of overly-convenient mode that I or anyone else can find. Did I mention I am a software engineer and work with several other very smart software engineers? I would not be surprised if there was some way making it let you put a specific time in, but the option is so obfuscated it might as well not even exist.
Now this works well for most people and most situations. However, there are times, more frequent than you might think, where someone needs to cook something for 15 minutes. Or where 1 minute is too short and 1:30 is too long. Yes you can babysit it and stop it at 1:15, but why should you have to? All the parts are there, they just have to give you a way to use them.
Which is pretty much my complaint about the direction they are taking with the GNOME desktop. All the parts are there but they won't let me use them. I have a couple of examples from recent changes that were considered controversial. The decision to remove minimize and maximize buttons from the window header and the decision to remove restart and power off options from the UI.
First the minimize/maximize issue. I would probably not be affected very much by this change since I do not use them very much. I used to use some of the fancier features that the GNOME window manager used back before this current elimination of options push. They used to have options to vertically and horizontally maximize your window. But noooo... People like Jeff Waugh say we can make the problems that the options are supposed to solve "disappear" and "make the choice meaningless." The only thing I saw disappear was the ability to easily vertically or horizontally maximize my windows. The need remained, but the option was gone. The ironic thing is that these options are making a comeback. After years of the Windows(tm) window manager being considered poor and featureless they added vertical maximization and "docking" to either half of the screen. Now they are adding these features to the NEW version of the GNOME window manager.
At the same time they are taking away other UI elements that are some of the most standard UI elements that have existed for most of, if not all of, the history of the WIMP interface. Here you can see what it looks like.
It doesn't look bad. In fact you can see this on some dialog windows in Windows(tm) programs. Generally dialogs that are designed to force a user to make a choice. But some people still like to use minimize and maximize buttons. I have read and heard them complain about this change. Defenders will note that you can still minimize and maximize by other means. It seems that people don't realize this. I have seen several YouTube videos of people previewing GNOME3 and they say they miss the option and seem unaware of alternate means of minimizing and maximizing. So we are back to the option being so obfuscated it might as well not exist. There are all kinds of usability reasons why the alternate methods are bad, but I won't get into that now.
The other recent kerfuffle is the removal of the "power off" and "restart" menu items from the menu where they live (that menu is another thing I don't like, but one thing at a time). You see, they had a bug. The bug said, that the suspend menu item did the same thing as the power menu item. So rather than make the suspend and power items work as they are supposed to, they removed the power button and just made suspend your only option. How this makes sense I do not know. Also, without obvious reason they removed the restart option. The idea is that A) laptops can run suspended forever (because everyone uses laptops and they are always plugged in) and B) If you need to reset then the system will prompt you (because all resets are due to software updates and never for other reasons that the system doesn't know about).
WAIT! You can get the power off option by opening the menu and then holding down the ALT key, which will make the "power off" option replace the suspend option. Problem solved!
That is an absolutely terrible solution. First of all, no one is ever going to discover that bit of functionality. When was they last time you held down ALT keys when using a menu to see if it changed? When should you have to do that? Never. More precisely, never ever. Plus it still doesn't fix the lack of a restart button.
Now, it is certainly possible to get carried away and overdo it. And too many options can be a problem. But just eliminating the choice doesn't make the problem go away. You need a UI that is, as Albert Einstein put it "as simple as possible, but no simpler."
There is a bigger issue at stake here. Linux users are generally more technical in nature. Tweaking their computers to get it to work just right is far more popular than it is among the general public. The GNOME team wants to start appealing to the general public more, but they will not succeed by alienating their current user base. They are not Apple or Microsoft. They do not have huge marketing departments that can spend millions of dollars on advertising and making their product a part of pop culture. The only way they will popularize Linux and GNOME is by having the current techie users convince their friends to use it. Take away that which appeals to the current techies and you have lost your only form of advocacy and advertisement. You will lose users rather than gain them.
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