Hi
The point I wanted to make with my rant was that I have observed over a period of time, say about three years that there "had been" very good progress over intuitiveness and usefulness of apps previously but in each new release that setup was disrupted with strange ways of doing the same things, some of which I elaborated previously. Now the problem which arises out of these disruptions is that the system which has reached a level of stability at desktop level is rendered useless and a new cycle begins to bring it back to stability and usefulness from a user's point of view. This I think is a wastage of resources for both programmers and users. Users try to grasp the new system of doing things and programmers try to debug or change the options. Now this sucks both of energy to bring something new and stabilize the system. What I mean with all this rant is that once an apps has reached maturity, its options or rather way of doing the acts should be frozen, or if that apps is being replaced with something new & improved then at least the working at user level should remain same. A user is not concerned with how a thing is being done behind the covers or what wizardry a programmer applied in the new apps code.
There are two things here. One is code churn and other one is the changes in the user interface. End users typically dont care much about internal code changes like you said. The user interaction model isnt mature enough to be boring yet and thats not expected to settle down anytime soon but there is a increasingly good focus on it which is the 'deliver the same but better' approach. Rapid development and feedback cycle is one of the key strengths of the development model we have relied upon to mature and improve the code and for a platform like Fedora the enhancements we get out of the feedback is shared by a large number of other platforms too. Now Fedora by design is a fast moving distribution and that obviously is appealing to a good number of users. When there is a larger number of updates, there is a potential higher chance of regressions.As have been pointed out by me earlier, one way to avoid this or significantly reduce the effect of disruption is for the active users with a suprisingly good amount of energy is to get their hands dirty with testing the updates ( updates-testing )or fedora development repository atleast for the major changes (as specified in the changelog or the version numbers).
You can very well form opinions and discuss this in length but more participation has a much higher impact. Atleast some of the users have the energy and interest to do this. What are you waiting for?
regards Rahul
