On Mon, 10 Jan 2022 at 07:52, Sam Varshavchik <mrsam@courier-mta.com> wrote:
Joe Zeff writes:

> On 1/8/22 9:03 PM, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
>>
>> One cute comment I saw that Xfce will have to be called 'E', as it is no 
>> longer 'fc' and once it jettisons X, well...
>
> Xfce hasn't stood for anything in particular for many years now.

Which is precisely the reason why xfce is a breath of fresh air. It just 
works. It does what a usable desktop should do: give me desktop icons; a 
menu bar; a tray; a pager; and some dockable icons. That's it.

Its profile is low enough not to attract interest from self-appointed UI 
experts whose mission is to frak up and turn a usable desktop environment 
into whatever they imagined while under the influence.

I don't think that is a realistic description of the effort that goes into DE designs.
Linux developers have to have a target class of users in mind, and also try
to make it easy for users to migrate from Apple and Microsoft DE's.  Years
ago at work, we had users whose primary system was Apple or Windows
and needed to use software running on a mini-super.  Our Xterminals were not
popular with that group, so we introduced a few NeXT systems and found that
both groups of users were happy to work with the NeXT systems.

There is actually a lot of research behind Microsoft and Apple user interface
designs, including focus groups and testing.   In my field (remote sensing)  I
encounter users trained in agronomy or marine biology whose prior exposure
to computing was their smart phone and game consoles.  If you suggest they
copy and paste the text of an error message into an online forum post, you get
a screen capture.   They have never encountered a terminal and many have
difficulty filling in text boxes in GUI applications -- they want a pull-down menu
where they can choose an item. 

One of the "mission critical" applications from NASA is a set of command-line
programs that were developed on SGI IRIX64 and now run on linux and macOS. 
NASA added a capability for the application to dump an XML file with details of
the command-line options and then used these to add a menu item with a section
for each program to an existing Java application.  The user fills in forms and the
Java application constructs a command line which can be run locally on
linux or passed to a remote server.  This allows many users who would
never get started if a command-line was the only way to run the programs. 
Once started, they want to run the same process on 100's to 1000's of files,
and will be willing to make the step to batch processing.  Many younger
users learned Python in university and now do batch processing with a
Python IDE.

For many users, this fell apart when they were suddenly forced to work remotely
after relying on using systems configured by others at their workplace. 

Many posts in this forum are seeking help with problems involving desktop
configuration, which shows that there is a big gap between UI design and
design for fixing broken systems.  Many of the younger users will simply
reinstall the OS and apps when something breaks.  Apple and Microsoft
both provide cloud storage that preserves user files and settings across installs,
so for many users this actually works as long as you are willing to live with a
basic configuration and minimal tweaks, but if the breakage is a reproducible
bug they get stuck in an endless loop until Dr. Google leads them to the fix.

--
George N. White III