[Trac #1053] OLPC needs a usable GUI (i.e. not Sugar)

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#1053: OLPC needs a usable GUI (i.e. not Sugar)
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 Reporter:  gnu     |       Owner:  jg       
     Type:  defect  |      Status:  new      
 Priority:  normal  |   Milestone:  Untriaged
Component:  distro  |    Keywords:           
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 The OLPC development team should replace the clumsy Sugar interface.  In
 release after release, it just gets worse.  Each problem is compounded by
 a lack of documentation matching the running software (i.e. you can never
 tell if it's deliberately designed to be terrible, or merely full of
 terrible bugs).  It's like wandering blind in a Colossal Cave where the
 only things you can see are cutesy icons that don't react to anything you
 do.  It's so simple that only a one-year-old can enjoy it, i.e. somebody
 whose idea of a good time is to drool spittle on the laptop and push on
 things at random.  There's no way to do 90% of what ordinary GUIs let you
 do, and the 10% that is provided is carefully hidden so you'll need a guru
 on IRC to find it.  Assuming you can get the wireless working, and you
 downloaded your own IRC program, and found out where the browser had
 stuffed it, and on and on...

 Some people probably think that we can just solve each individual problem
 and things will get better.  E.g. Build 303 requires the user to do a
 complicated undocumented dance before it will let them log in.  Yes, this
 could be solved.  But the deeper problem is that the Sugar team continues
 to invent such obstacles to intuitive use -- and considers them progress.
 With each release, the laptop becomes harder and harder to use, because
 the UI designers don't seem to know the difference between easy and hard,
 between intuitive and inscrutable.  The fix is not to keep fixing their
 errors; the fix is to find designers who have sense, so they stop doing
 new things that need constant fixing.

 Why should kids have to batter their way through this idiocy before they
 can get to any educational materials?  Why does everybody just keep
 shrugging and apologizing for how rotten the UI is, without doing anything
 about it?  It's true, on paper, Sugar's ideas might have been a brilliant
 advance in the state of the art, another miracle like the LCD screen, like
 the power management, like the OLPC business model.  But once Sugar was
 implemented and we could use it, it turned out that it WASN'T a brilliant
 idea; in fact, it sucked.  Face facts!  Give it up and get something that
 works, rather than have it torpedo the project.  You'd have a nice machine
 here if it didn't fight the user at every chance.

 Let's move to a window system where the objects on screen are responsive
 to the user.  Where programs are programs, and none of them are jargon
 "activities".  Where you can run more than the twelve apostles that are
 lined up along the bottom of the screen.

 OLPC should abandon Sugar and install a working Linux GUI.

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1053>
One Laptop Per Child <http://laptop.org/>