Comment 628 for bug 532633

@scholli

Open my mind? With all due respect, I'm very open, but *likely* more experienced on this type of thing. I'm running Ubuntu and Kubuntu and pushing Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu and I'm an MCSE! My work is now Windows, Mac and Ubuntu, but mostly Windows. AFAIK I'm the only one in the company on 10.04 so far (although with 60,000 plus employees, maybe not), but I've been polling with what I've got locally in and out of work. Folks are used to buttons on the right, and just don't want them to change right now, at least not without more changes. This changes the default on users that don't know how to even change it back or how easy it is to change back.

Keep in mind I've got experience with stuff like this. 10 years ago I'd have been on your side of it and wondering why all the resistance to change. But after getting my head bashed about, I'm now a little more cautious on *how* to deploy UI improvements. I had a more "minor" UI change than this that ended up causing pitchforks and torches to get unleashed on me. You need to open your mind that what is minor to you and me can be a "catastrophic" defect for others. Is it really catastrophic? No, but in their mind it is, and that's what counts. UI changes aren't always about logic and reason. In fact that can make it worse on occasion... People get warm and fuzzy "familiar" feeling for their desktops. That emotion is what clouds this. My wife (former secretary who is from the prime target market for UI discussions like this because they are so irritable on UI changes) just explained to me that the irrationality is purely based on expectations. If the expectation is one thing, and the actual result is another, that's where the anger and sometimes blind rage comes from. Modify an existing interface with no visible reason for a change? She gets mad, quickly. Totally change the whole thing (so long as the changes make sense and are of benefit), and she expects to have to learn something new, and her expectations are properly set.

I ran the change by my wife with Gnome2, and she hated it. I got the standard "DON'T MOVE MY BUTTONS!" response... Ran it by her with Gnome3, and she liked actually it, but Gnome3 is a paradigm shift on the desktop UI that largely obsoletes minimize and maximize. Gnome 2 is just a BAD choice for this. It's now a teetering old UI that needs replaced, not mildly and inexplicably modified... As I said before, it's like a fresh coat of paint on a house scheduled for demolition the following week.

Cheers
Jeff