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I have spent the last two weeks working to make print-manager experience in 4.11 the best I could. And this post should be about it. Sadly it’s not.

Whenever I write free software I write because I want to, because I have the need and since I don’t paid to do this I spend the time I can. Besides the selfishness I value user feedback a lot, Apper is an example of user feed back, not perfect yet but lots of things there changed because of this, yet sometimes one has to take a final word.

There has been some noise over the last years about “not invented here”, forks and diversity. People blame the Linux ecosystem of having no direction, no focus and hence failing on the Desktop. But they forget to remember that even Countries with much more control were divided because people are different. Heck yes everyone is different so there is no way of pleasing everyone, and this is what I like in Linux.

I’d rather be using OSX if it wasn’t for that, really OSX has awesome applications, iPhoto, Mail, Finder… and now I even have a MacBook, I could instead be build OSX apps and making money! Why don’t I use it?

Because I can’t change it. No matter how good it is for lots of people, it’s not good for me at several points. And heck our Desktop if much far from what I wanted a Desktop to be but still I can help changing this and have lots of fun.

So why am I sad? Simply because I’ll need to fork a component which I was actually willing to improve, and no it’s not because my improvements were rejected or ignored, but because some people don’t like Switches. Yes, you don’t like it either? Fine, but take a look on what has just happened:

Before 4.11

After 4.11

Now think for a moment what is that checkbox trying to tell you

• Cable connected [Check]
• Output enabled [Check]

Before 4.11

After 4.11

What about these?

Easy, that’s the list of printers I want to go shopping

No I’m not questioning if you like switches better that checkboxes, I’m fine if you do, I’m questioning the API that was changed post freeze, without being listed on the feature plan and that has just given me more work to do.

A checkbox must have a description text unless it’s a list of things, even then it is bound to some action normally described with a text or an icon. So even if I was ok with the change I’d need fixing this at soft freeze.

Yes I could instead just fork the component and don’t waste time writing a blog post. But as mailing list didn’t work out (I raised my points on three different threads and suddenly it got commited) I’d like to hear what users of printer-manager or kscreen or any application using Switches think about.

Granted I’ll keep the switches there, hopefully I’ll manage to find time to write a better one as I agree with the fact that this one is indeed confusing. But not because it’s confusing that we should replace instead of fixing.

And let me apologize for making this public, but we ain’t an evil company that must hide into mailing lists. I believe users should be able to give feedback even it goes to /dev/null.

This is my personal opinion.

and that being said I must say I’m very sad, really.