Bruce Perens <bruce@???> wrote:

> Apple actually didn't win because it had a big marketing department and psychologists. Just Steve. I worked with Steve for 12 years, and during part of that time had an office right across from his at Pixar. Steve understood a lot of stuff that would help Free Software. His lessons are right there for us to use, if we can only make ourselves listen.

I take that with something of a pinch of salt.
But where I do agree is that Apple (initially at least, in the "post iMac" world) was successful because Jonny Ive created things that people liked to look at, and (led by SJ) Apple created an OS that people liked to use. It's a pity that later on, SJ succumbed to some of the things he fought against during the early years (in particular, corporate lock-in).

But referring back to your earlier comment on why the Gnome dev stance is "right" - I respectfully disagree. There is nothing wrong with creating a consistent default experience - that is a good thing in general. But that does not preclude those who know what they are doing from customising that experience to their own needs/preferences.

One point which I am painfully aware of as a Mac user - scroll bars.
They used to be clear and intuitive to me. Then they changed the default to be very non-intuitive (things scroll the wrong way) - but at least they left a setting to "correct" this defect they'd introduced. Then they've gone against what SJ used to stand for by making it (in some cases completely, in general, the scroll buttons) hidden - why should such an important control now be hidden as well as non-intuitive ? I put that one down to the iPad effect - they made the same mistake as Microsoft in trying to make users use the same UI for a touchscreen as they use with a mouse.
So now I have a feature that irritates me all the time (especially when I'm trying to scroll with the fineness that one click of the old scroll button used to provide), and I have yet to find a way of "fixing" it.

What you appear to be suggesting is that for the sake of the 95%, the 5% should not be permitted to "fix" things to work as they want them to work. And that if we do customise then we'd be unable to understand that what we are running isn't the standard UI. Yes there will be some people who blindly customise "because they can" without understanding the consequences - but I don't think that's a large enough proportion to justify telling the 5% that they CANNOT use their own systems as they wish.