'Interface nazis' in Torvalds' line of fire

Sam Varghese
Sunday, 18 February 2007 21:46

Opinion and Analysis

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Torvalds used the phrase "interface nazis" in December 2005 to describe the GNOME developers, whom he accused of having a mentality of "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality". Jeff Waugh, an employee of Canonical (the firm that owns Ubuntu) and a GNOME developer, tried to smooth over things then, but Torvalds was in no mood to be placated and shot back, "Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doign (sic) something is not "it's too complicated to do", but "it would confuse users".

He advised users to switch to the other well-known Linux desktop environmnent, KDE.

A week ago, the argument was revived on the Desktop Architects mailing list which is hosted by what was the Open Source Development Labs - the organisation has now merged with the Free Standards Group to form the The Linux Foundation.

Torvalds responded to a post which questioned his December 2005 posting, saying that the GNOME project had the attitude of creating software which was easy to use and stopping at that. "Gnome people seem to think that once you "got into it", you never want to do anything more. Not true," he wrote.

Challenged to use GNOME for a month and then relate his experiences at the forthcoming GNOME User and Developer European Conference (scheduled to be held in Birmingham, UK, from July 15 to 21) Torvalds responded by sending in patches for GNOME to fix something which he wanted: "I want to configure my mouse button window events. That doesn't sound so bad, does it? Everybody else can do it, gnome does not. My laptop has a two-button mouse, which means that I want the right button to do something more useful than show me the menu that I never use."