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Usability and accessibility

ho: GNOME has always had a great focus both on usability and accessibility. Do you think some of that might be sacrificed for the sake of bringing new features to GNOME 3.0? I can't help thinking of KDE 4.0 which was released in January 2008 with a shiny new interface but being far from ready for productive use...

VU: We definitely don't want to have GNOME 3.0 out while it's not usable. All of our GNOME 2.x releases are of high quality, and this is something we're really proud of; we don't want to lose this.

We aim for a release in March 2010, but for this exact reason, we're ready to postpone the release to September 2010. That's a decision we'll take in approximately two months, in November, by looking at the status of our modules to know if we're on the right path, or if expecting 3.0 in March is not realistic.

Of course, with GNOME Shell, the base UI of GNOME will change a lot. With big changes like this, there are always people who will be unhappy because they preferred the previous version. But that won't be because it will be less usable, but because people have habits (there might be small regressions here and there as always happens with software development, but a major regression would be a blocker for the release). Our challenge is to make GNOME Shell so awesome that people won't be afraid of discarding their old habits to adopt GNOME 3.0. We also have plans to make the GNOME 2.x look and feel available for some time in GNOME 3, as a fall-back.

It's worth mentioning that the accessibility stack is being rewritten at the moment to be based on D-Bus instead of ORBit (it will therefore be usable in other desktop environments, especially KDE). It's a major task that is well on its way, but people with interest in accessibility can help make sure everything goes smoothly with some additional testing!

ho: Who is GNOME for? Do you think GNOME is equally well suited for Linux beginners and more advanced users?

VU: The differentiation between beginners and advanced users is not really something I believe in: people in both of those categories first want to use their computer, and share common requirements. You can easily find happy GNOME users for each of these categories.

We're simply designing GNOME for the majority of the users, by making an intuitive and attractive user interface that you don't have to fight. It's also quite flexible, which explains why it works with the work flow of a home user and of a business user. Targeting the majority of the users also explains why localisation and accessibility are so important to us.

There are of course people who are not satisfied with GNOME, for various reasons, and that's fine: we don't aim to be a good solution for 100 per cent of the users. We know this is not possible. Fortunately, there are other free desktops out there, like Xfce or KDE, that have a different design and philosophy, which are great alternatives for people that don't want to use GNOME.

Next: Displays - Large and small

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