Off the Beat: Bruce Byfield's Blog

As you may have seen, the Phoronix site is hosting a private survey about GNOME. The survey still has several weeks to run, but, so far, neither the circumstances surrounding the survey or the replies show the GNOME project in a favorable perspective.

The survey was begun by Felipe Contreras, who first raised the idea back in July on the GNOME desktop-devel mailing list. "Lately I've [been] feeling that there's a lot of dissatisfaction with GNOME 3," he wrote. "Why not find for good what people are thinking with an user-survey?"

Conteras spent considerable time in the past few months refining the questions in the survey, sparking long and sometimes heated discussions. When the GNOME Foundation wouldn't host the survey, Phoronix agreed to do so instead.

Some of the mailing list participants, including Alan Cox, responded with helpful criticism and support. Naturally, too, the discussion included the immersion in details and bike-shedding that is typical of the free software community.

However, reading the various threads, you can't escape the suspicion that many of the responses from GNOME developers were deliberately obstructionist, providing reason after reason for rejecting the entire idea of the survey without offering any possible alternatives.

For instance, when one developer said that the survey still needed improvement but failed to give any concrete suggestions, Zeeshan Ali lectured Conteras that, "You are the one who proposed the idea of this survey and (more importantly) insist that a useful survey is possible for GNOME so *you* must address all criticism/concerns if you want us to take your proposal seriously."

With even more hostility, Josselin Mouette wrote, "Well, here’s a suggestion: since nobody knows how to address the correct target population or how to interpret the results, I suggest to spend our time fixing bugs instead." Similarly, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller announced a mock award was to be given to Conteras for "endurance." By September, Conteras was writing that he was "effectively banned from desktop-devel," since his emails were taking two weeks to be moderated.

In other words, the discussion was, as Alan Cox put it, "in blocking mode," In another message, Cox referred to the logo of Miguel's Izaca's old company Ximian, one of the major early developers of GNOME, commenting that, "Some days I think Miguel got the Ximian monkey dead right, except that there should have been three of them" -- presumably, see, speak, and hear no evil.

That Cox successfully summarized the mood of many of the responses is indicated by Christophe Fergeau's comment early in the discussion that the survey would be unrepresentative and would only result in people saying, 'upstream [GNOME] ignores their users!' -- to which Richard Hughes added, "To upstream maintainers, even a 'user survey' telling us to do X, Y or Z is probably going to be ignored. Users don't know what they want."

As you look through the discussion of the proposed survey, you can only conclude that GNOME developers' strategy -- officially or unofficially -- was to ignore criticism of GNOME 3 and to make sure that they never heard it, all in the hopes that it would go away.

Not a lot of love

If that was in any sense the strategy, GNOME was right to be wary of the responses. On Tuesday, Phoronix reprinted the first eight thousand comments in the survey. While some of the comments included stock phrases like, "Keep up the good work!", the lack of satisfaction with GNOME 3 was overwhelming.

If my sampling of a random hundred comments is in any way representative, then some 75% of survey takers -- even those who view the GNOME 3 series favorably -- have lists of technical improvements they would like to see in GNOME, including classic menus, icons on the desktop, and more and better customization and documentation. Some 25% view GNOME 3 with hostility, while, even by the most generous count, only about 13% are enthusiastic about it. 15% requested a return to the GNOME 2 series or the fallback mode, its equivalent in GNOME 3, and 3% talked about migrating to another desktop like KDE or Xfce.

Some of the hostile comments:

• Gnome devs have previously been accused of not giving a shit about their userbase. Gnome3 is proof. Ya I'm bitching, but I was a gnome user for 4 years up till the 'switch'...Seriously, Vista was less horrible than Gnome3. Thanks a bunch for 'removing a choice' from the linux ecosystem.
• Stop assuming that users are retarded.
• GNOME 3.0 (gnome shell) was released way too incomplete. Even 3.2 is incomplete and /barely/ usable on a daily basis without significant tweaking and adding of various extensions. This is hurting your image.
• Overall, GNOME seems to concentrate on forcing an increasing number of stupid ideas on people.
• Please listen to your users.

By contrast, few of those who said they liked GNOME 3 elaborated on the statement, or expressed any enthusiasm. In fact, those who said they liked GNOME 3 were about as likely to list technical improvements as those who were disliked it. In general, the level of enthusiasm didn't equal the level of dis-satisfaction, let alone of hostility.

Some Conclusions Become Inevitable

Results like these can be explained away with all sorts of time-honored rationalizations. You could say that only those with a point to make are likely to respond, and that survey takers are unlikely to be representative of GNOME users as a whole. You could say, too, that neither the methodology nor the questions in the survey are up to professional standards. Each of these rationalizations would have a kernel of truth, too.

However, so far, at least, the numbers aren't even close. As a result, it's hard to see how any rationalization could completely explain away either the dis-satisfaction or the hostility. Even allowing for generous margins of error, both seem undeniably real. In fact, their extent is surprising, even to someone like me, who has been voicing some of the specific complaints (and hearing them) for months.

Even worse is the response of what Cox calls "the GNOME oligarchy." From the evidence of the mailing list, GNOME leaders seemed to have suspected what the response would be, and done their best to obstruct and stonewall Conteras and his survey rather than face the truth. This kind of behavior is more what you would expect from the executives of a proprietary company rather the guardians of a large free software project. As Cox observes,

"Blocking a volunteer off [from doing] stuff and see what happens be it code or otherwise is usually the wrong thing to do." It's not in the best tradition of the community, and can only make the situation worse.

Maybe the final results of the survey will be different from the preliminary ones. However, I can't imagine that they will change very much. And already the conclusion is inescapable: GNOME 3 is a problem for most users. Moreover, evading the fact doesn't work.

The only questions now are whether the project will admit the unavoidable facts, and what plans it can develop to salvage a situation that should never have got so far out of control in the first place.

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