FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424

[Matthew Garrett]

Put simply, any argument based on "Nobody's complained, so it's fine" is 
fallacious. People expect Linux to be dreadful. If something works 
they're happy - if it doesn't, it's because Linux isn't ready for the 
desktop yet. And when we've still got a community that's more inclined 
to tell people that they should read the documentation rather than ask 
whether a specific UI is sufficiently understandable, it's hardly 
unsurprisingly that people aren't going to spend a great deal of time 
complaining about how unintuitive they found some aspect of UI.

If people raise issues with a suggestion and the counterargument is 
"Users haven't raised this problem" then we can't draw conclusions about 
why they haven't. Maybe it's because the average user is smart enough to 
figure out that the multitude of volume controls we ship are all 
intended for subtly different purposes. Maybe it's because they can't be 
bothered filing bugs. Maybe it's because they're scared of raising a 
contentious subject. Who knows? In the end we still come down to making 
decisions based on the opinions of people we deem to be experts in the 
field. And if you don't trust the desktop team to make the appropriate 
decision in this case then it would be helpful for you to say so 
plainly.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org