Re: "Other/Proprietary License with Source"

On Sun, 07 Sep 2008 09:04:04 +0100, Roy Lanek <lanek-tnsfOxNVUhtWk0Htik3J/[email protected]> wrote:

>> Who cares about such numbers, can always astroturf them up.
>
> Agreed ... in part.
>
> On the other hand, consider that becoming familiar and acquainted with  
> Ion
> demands some effort (why?--is another story; would all the users not be
> *spoiled*, in the Pavlovian sense, the situation might be different).

Well, ease of use doesn't necessarily mean a short learning curve. If you  
want to be able to use something 'intuitively' from the word go, of course  
you're going to go for the WM with the most familiar concepts. That's why  
Gnome's so popular -- they've gone out of their way to make themselves  
more Windowsy (or, lack the imagination to come up with anything original,  
depending on your POV).

> Back to Ion (Vim, elvis, Mutt, LyX, cdrtools, ...), if you don't have a
> knowledgeable tutor at hand, are not *enlightened* enough (but then we  
> have

I've found ion's documentation a lot, lot better than most other WM's. A  
lot of them seem to take the approach "oh, well, we're 'easy to use' so we  
shouldn't /need/ documentation", which works well until you want to do  
something that isn't on their very pretty GUI.

Vim's actually an excellent example of my previous point, that ease of use  
!= short learning curve. I'm pretty sure I don't know half of vim's  
keybindings yet, but the ones I do know make it a lot easier than, say,  
gedit. If I want to do something in vim, I'm usually quite confident that  
that's because I don't know how to do it (and subsequently look it up)  
rather than it lacks the feature.

> <snip>

I'm not sure I follow your scuba anecdotes and talk of pheromones. But if  
people want to use ion, great. If not, who cares? It's not like Tuomo's  
trying to make money from having a large user base. It's a tool; you can  
either choose to use it because it suits your needs, or you can use  
something else.

Anyway, that's my 2p on it!

Nick