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Antonio Ospite, theorist attacks

In Debian Unstable the transition to Gnome 3 is taking place; when Gnome 3.0 firstly came out some unnamed geeky users complained loudly about the design decisions of the development team to push strongly towards gnome-shell as a new default UI; gnome-shell was designed focusing on usability (usability is a metric relative to a certain target audience BTW) and simplicity, hiding a lot of details from the users. Obviously you can never make everyone happy so some of us simply happened to be “out of target”: you know us computer people (*cough cough*), we like to be in charge and control The Machine...

Attached files: 

Adwaita theme patch for fall-back mode

gnome-themes-standard 3.4.2 Adwaita theme patch for fall-back mode

Recently both OSnews and Slashdot pointed out some experiments about context-aware UIs done by Christian Giordano at Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu GNU/Linux), and the first results are somewhat interesting. As you can see in the good video demo from the original article the effects are nothing mind blowing, but they serve greatly to illustrate the concept, and by building on that something more useful would come out eventually.

That reminds me of another (never realized) old idea of mine from when I was attending the Operating System course at the university, I wanted to bind system responsiveness —at a lower level— to user presence, by tuning scheduler parameters according to the user being at his/her computer or not.