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Hello, I saw your debian-desktop webpage and like the idea. What I wondered though, was whether the "Debian" way of dealing with this would not to get bits into Debian policy to make the distribution more desktop-friendly. It would probably take quite a bit of discussion until everyone was happy, but I am sure that the results would be more than worth it. After all, one of the things that makes the Mac such a pleasant system to use is the strict adherence to Apple's human interface guidelines, and Debian's rigourous adherence to it's policy is probably *the* main strength of the distribution. A couple of suggestions for possible policies follow bellow. Here "task" means anything the user wants to do with their computer, from setting it up to viewing a PDF to editing an image from their camera. By the way, have you considered making this mailing list subscriber only, and hiding the e-mail addresses? You currently seem to have a bit of a spam problem... Regards, Michael === Policy suggestions ==================================== * No task should require more user action and interaction than necessary, and where possible, sensible defaults should be chosen or autodetected to avoid the user having to take unnecessary action. If in doubt, more common actions should require less action than less common ones. * Wherever possible, the user should be able to carry out tasks without using a command line or text editor. * Getting a task done should not require the user to install more than one package, including the GUI interface if one is available. * The actions needed by a user to accomplish a given task should be as consistent as possible with those needed to accomplish similar tasks, at least as long as the user stays within a given set of tools (i.e. one desktop environment, one configuration method, etc) and should follow any relevant human interface guidelines. * It should be easy for the user to work out how to accomplish a given action without having to search on the internet. * The user should not be presented with unnecessary information, and the way the information is presented should be kept as simple as possible (i.e. no technical jargon unless not using it makes the message harder to understand) and as consistent as possible. However, additional information should be easily accessible should the user want it. * Interfaces and applications should work "as expected". Features should either work properly or be disabled, possible notifying the user if the user would expect them to be available (i.e. a PDF viewer which does not support forms well should disable them and pop up a warning if the user loads a PDF containing forms). Explore the seven wonders of the world Learn more! |