Rensselaer, NY
I am currently working on a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I work in the field of computer vision and image processing. My research deals with 3D data analysis, particularly from LiDAR scanners. I have benefited tremendously from the practices of open source and strive to continue to do my part to continue the give-and-take cycle!
Authored Comments
"If "everything was all one window manager", I'd have been locked into Gnome3 just as Windows users are locked into the newer UI elements of post-Vista Windows (and Office!)"
Hopefully if everything was one window manager, they wouldn't have been allowed to make such a drastic change that everyone hates :) But at least I could witch to KDE :)
Typically I'm a fan of competition, but when neither is done all that well, it seems like a better plan would be to join forces and do one right(er).
I think Dru hit the nail on the head with why this "rush to new changes" seems to happen. Except in extremely well oiled teams that actually maintain release branches and apply bug fixes to them (which tends to happen only with very large pieces of software), it is much much easier for developers to say to users "just use the new version, all the bugs you are complaining about are fixed there." Another reason is that developers use the latest version of big packages because it is again much much easier than supporting various versions of a package. So my point here is that the "grandpa" user might only use big big software (firefox, etc), but as you move only slightly up the spectrum of "power users", the tools and packages they like to use become smaller, more focused, and therefore (not necessarily but usually) less "well written and maintained" (in the sense that they don't worry so much about versioning and dependency versioning). These are very likely the same group of people that might visit this site, and are therefore complaining about your original statements about easy of use :)