| GNOME 3 is a perfect, and very recent, example of what you're describing. It was open source programmers who made GNOME 2 and earlier a successful, usable desktop environment. These were very technical users who created software that generally worked well for their purposes, but incidentally also worked well for other, less-technical users, too. Yet at some point, we saw the number of "designers" and "UI experts" start to grow, and eventually overwhelm the number of programmers. The "make it usable by everyone" mantra took over, but without the skill and sensibility we saw from programmers alone. The end result has been GNOME 3. At best, it can be considered one of the worst open source disasters of all time. Its designer-driven development process and subsequent lack of usability and quality has alienated many programmers. These are exactly the kind of people who shouldn't be alienated, because they did things right in the first place. Aside from a few odd cases here and there, GNOME 3 is generally hated by anyone who uses his or her computer to do real work. And what you say about seeking alternatives, or even creating them, is very true. KDE and Xfce benefited immensely from the GNOME 3 debacle, accepting many of the talented and valuable GNOME "refugees". MATE and Cinnamon have been born to try to fix the problem, as well. GNOME 3 isn't the only example. Firefox is another good example, and obviously quite relevant to Opera. It has been systematically dumbed-down basically every release starting with Firefox 4, which has rendered it far less useful than it once was, causing many advanced users to abandon it. Opera does indeed appear to be following this same path, unfortunately. Opera 15 has the same feeling that GNOME 3 does, in that it is a regression from the previous versions. Discarding so many things that make Opera 12 and earlier such a great browser just isn't a good way forward. |
Sure they've lost some people ("I can't install compiz fusion any more") - but in the last 6 month I'm reading lots of "it's fine - first it was a big change, but now I really like it".
I like GNOME3 and would never want back to GNOME2. But everyone his own's.