I’ve taken the time to read one by one the suggestions from the 2011 GNOME user survey, I’ve only managed to read 20% of them so far, but I don’t think they will shift that much (I might update this post if they do).

The next version of the survey will have these and other suggestions already listed, so it would be easier for users’ voice to be heard, and summarize the results.

Note: I already posted most of these on my previous post, but apparently people didn’t like my critical tone, so these are the suggestions only, not my opinion.

1. Better customization

This is by far the most requested, people don’t want to manually fiddle with gconf/dconf, extensions, or gnome-tweak, they want a whole lot more options integrated. One suggestion was to have an advanced mode.

Not only do people want more options, but they think some of the current ones are useless, and that defaults are all wrong. They also want more options for power management, like deciding what happens when you close the lid. Also more options to change the appearance: font, icons, keyboard bindings, screensaver, etc. Also, disable the accessibility stuff.

2. GNOME 2

People love their GNOME 2. A lot of them suggested to have two interfaces: the traditional one, and the shell, others requested to improve the fallback mode, but most of them demanded to get rid of GNOME shell completely. A lot of people also asked specifically to bring back the GNOME 2 panel, and taskbar.

3. Improve performance and footprint

A lot people think GNOME is too bloated and asked for better performance, less CPU usage, less memory usage, smoother animations, faster start-up times, etc. Specially the ones that have used GNOME shell, which apparently is a resource hog, or at least that’s what users say.

4. Nautilus

People are definitely not happy with nautilus. They complain it’s too slow, takes too much time to start, and lacks a lot functionality. Many suggested to get rid of it and use some of the already existing alternatives.

5. Notifications

The new notifications are annoying; one shouldn’t need to move the mouse cursor the corner to see them; that makes it easy to miss them, which defeats the purpose of a notification.

6. Shutdown / Restart / Suspend

This is a no-brainer; just add this option. Yes, you can see them by pressing “alt” but people don’t want that, there’s no excuse to remove basic functionality, and users are complaining hard for this particular feature.

7. Improve theming

Users want better themes and icons, they don’t like the default theme, also want a dark theme, and think the amount of customization a theme can achieve is not enough.

8. Better multi-monitor support

Another very requested feature was to improve multi-monitor support, which apparently works very badly in GNOME shell.

9. Improve Evolution

A considerable amount of people suggested to get rid of Evolution completely, because it has so many problems, and because there are better alternatives (i.e. Thunderbird). Some people only want to use the calendar part of it, because it’s integrated to other parts of GNOME’s UI, so they suggested to split this component. The rest suggested many ways to improve it, like stop the constant crashing.

10. Listen to users

Lastly, a lot of people think that GNOME developers are ignoring users, and their suggestions. Also, they don’t like the developers’ attitude that users are idiots, and developers/designers know best.

The problem

As #10 shows, the problem is that GNOME developers don’t listen to the users, or at least that’s the perception from a lot of users, and since the community rejected the idea of running and/or blessing this survey, it would be safe to assume that they would ignore the results. The story of this survey is rather interesting, and explains a lot, but you can read about it through Bruce Byfield’s mouth instead of mine in his article ‘The Survey That GNOME Would Rather Ignore‘.

Even before the survey was run, GNOME developers said the results would be worthless, however, the only valid criticism was the possibility of non-response bias, which fortunately didn’t happen, and I explained why in my analysis of the survey results. I still haven’t received any comments from GNOME developers after I publicized the analysis of the results, so if there’s any valid criticism remaining, I still haven’t heard of it.

I wish they would look at these results critically, not outright reject them, and if there’s any problem with the survey, tackle the problems for the 2012 survey, and even more: run the survey themselves. Wouldn’t that be great?

Other suggestions

Reduce dependencies (specially PulseAudio)

Improved reliability / stability

Minimize / Mazimize

Tiling

alt+tab

Faster shell search

Collaborate more with other communities

Fix ATI fglrx issues

Integrate Zeitgeist

Render KDE apps seamlessly

Reduce dead space

Compiz compatibility