Analysis of the 2011 GNOME user survey results

Last year Phoronix launched the 2011 GNOME user survey, an effort I initiated to try to give a voice to GNOME users, a voice I though was sorely lacked. I knew the effort wasn’t going to be accepted by GNOME developers, because through the years they have always rejected anything that resembles user feedback: surveys, polls, brainstorm, or something as easy as enabling voting in bugzilla. I gave it a try anyway because I made a bet with Zeeshan Ali that this would happen, and it did (although he never accepted that).

However, in the process the effort received a lot of positive feedback and the survey improved quite a lot, it would have been a shame to throw it to the trash, so, as Alan Cox suggested, I tried to make this survey happen anyway and thanks to Michael Larabel from Phoronix, it did.

According to GNOME people, such a survey, or in fact, any survey will always give bad results, because it’s impossible to get rid of all the biases. This was discussed extensively in the GNOME desktop-devel mailing list, and despite all my efforts to convince them otherwise, I didn’t succeed (which wasn’t a surprise at all). To give an idea of the sort of resistance we are talking about, I made the argument that even president elections across the globe would have similar problems, and they argued that even those are flawed. One would have to wonder what method in their minds would give proper statistically significant user feedback, but the answer is not surprising: nothing. Yet, they claim they listen to users, somehow. Although their method of “listening to users” remains mysterious, it probably involves personal experience: talking with their friends and family, and close circles (which are more biased than any survey could).

But in this discussion there was valid criticism, mainly the non-response bias. It was argued that only people that hate GNOME would answer the survey, and thus the survey would be biased towards negative comments, and the results worthless. There is some truth to that claim, and the survey tried to identify and mitigate that factor, with success I think. I will start by explained how this was done, because otherwise the survey would indeed be worthless for many purposes, which is not the case. Other arguments against the results of the survey are invalid in my opinion, but unlike other blogs from GNOME developers, this blog has comments open, so if you disagree and find other valid criticism to this survey, you are free to comment below.

Nevertheless, the most important point that GNOME people missed, is that this was a survey v1.0, and like all open source software, it can (and will) improve. Even if they are correct (they aren’t), and the results of v1.0 is totally worthless, that doesn’t mean that v2.0, or later versions, will. Unfortunately in their mind neither v1.0, nor v100.0 can provide any helpful results at all, or for that matter any other survey in the history of humanity.

I will present the rationale of why I think these results are good and valid, and I think any rational person would agree, but you would be the judge of that.

If you want to see the straight results of the survey, go to this Phoronix page.

Non-response bias

Let’s invent a scenario where we have a population of 1000 people, and we want to figure out how many people like shopping. To do that we sample 100 people and it turns out around 25% of them say they like shopping. That’s it, right? Job done. Well, what happens if most of people interviewed where males, say 2/3 males, 1/3 females. We know from other sources that we should expect the male/female ratio to be around 50/50, so we know there was a disproportion, but is that a problem? If it turns out that say, females have a bias towards liking shopping, then yes, there is a problem.

If we find results like that, we know there is bias, but we can use our knowledge about the male/female ratio expected in the total population to calculate what would be the real amount of people that like to shop in the total population. But as GNOME people were quick to mention, we don’t have a census of Linux desktop users, so we don’t have any idea of the proportions we might expect for different biases. In the example above, if we don’t know the male/female ratio of the total population, then we have no idea if 33/66 was disproportionate or not, all we know is that there is bias. And that’s the end of the game, the 25% our survey returned is worthless. We can say how many females and males like shopping, but nothing about the total population. I wouldn’t call this totally worthless, but GNOME people would.

But that is only if there is a bias. If it turns out that males and females like shopping at roughly the same proportion, then it doesn’t matter what is the ratio of the total population, and it doesn’t matter if we are being disproportionate or not. All we can do is identify the bias, if we don’t even ask the question “What is your sex?”, then we are truly lost, because we can’t even know if there was bias or not. So all we can do is try to identify all possible sources of bias, and then check if this bias is indeed happening or not.

Even worst is what happens if no females participate in the survey at all. That is highly unlikely in this case, but consider online surveys; people without Internet would be unlikely to participate, and if they have a bias then the results would be skewed. This was also used by GNOME people as an argument against any kind of online survey.

However, I had an idea; what if we ask people to print the survey and give it to these kind of people without Internet. This in effect would be no different from a survey that is not online, the only difference is that instead of paying people to go around finding GNOME users, we ask the community to do so — crowd-sourcing the problem. We didn’t ask this directly, perhaps for v2, but I added a question to identify how people are filling the survey: on their own, on behalf of somebody else, and so on.

We did spend a considerable amount of time trying to identify all these possible biases, and then add questions in the survey to see if there’s bias or not, and that’s all anybody can do.

So all the criticism GNOME people threw was taken care one way or the other, even if they didn’t agree so. The only way the results of this survey would be worthless is if somebody comes up with a possible bias that no question in the survey would identify (we need a new survey), or if it turns out there’s a real bias (we need a census).

Was there bias?

Let’s examine the main claim of GNOME people; people that answer the survey would have a bias towards hating GNOME.

Overall, how satisfied are you with GNOME?

Barely, Completely, Halfway, Mostly, Not At All

How are you taking this survey?

I am acting on behalf of somebody else, Completely on my own, Other, Somebody is pushing for me to do it

As you can see irrespective of the way people answered the survey, there’s a clear tendency: most people avoided the extremes and answered primarily “Mostly”, and then “Halfway”. The people that answered “I am acting on behalf of somebody else” went more for the extremes, but the difference is not significantly different from the people that answered “Completely on my own”. So, fortunately it seems GNOME people were wrong; there’s no bias.

Just to be sure, lets look at another, similar question:

How do you compare your current GNOME version with the version from one year ago?

Better, No Changes, Cannot Say, Worse

Again we see no significant differences depending on how people answered the survey; most people said either better, or worse at about the same rate. The people that answered on behalf of somebody else had a tendency to answer “Better”, and the people that got pushed, answered “Worse” a bit more, but in general no big difference.

Clearly, if there is a bias, it’s not dependent on how people are answering the survey. There’s another possibility; we didn’t get enough proxy responses. Statistically speaking, we would expect the results of “I am acting on behalf of somebody else” to be ±18% off target, but “Somebody is pushing for me to do it” only ±8, based on the amount of responses with a 95% certainty. So it would be nice if we get more of these responses on the next survey, but we can be relatively certain that if there is a bias, it’s not that great. Certainly not enough to declare the whole survey worthless.

I did similar analyses on the different questions of the survey, and I couldn’t find any significant biases from groups that could be underrepresented, therefore, the results of the survey are valid.

However, there are certain interesting results.

Interesting results

This is the same improvement question, but depending on whether or not people used GNOME 3.

How do you compare your current GNOME version with the version from one year ago?

Better, No Changes, Cannot Say, WorsePeople that haven’t used GNOME 3 mostly say that it hasn’t changed, but the ones that have used it have very different opinions, which matches what we have seen in online discussions: people either hate it or love it, but it’s interesting to see that the split is 50/50.

Another theory that popped in the discussions was that people that use terminals would hate GNOME 3, but “normal people” would love it.

Overall, how satisfied are you with GNOME?

Barely, Completely, Halfway, Mostly, Not At All

How often do you use a terminal/console?

Is there anything else?, When I have no other option, I can’t live without them, What is that?

However, it seems to be the opposite: people that don’t even know what a terminal is certainly don’t like GNOME, it’s the rest that do: from people that use it when there’s no other option, from people that don’t use anything else.

One of my theories was that contributors to the project would have a bias toward liking it.

Overall, how satisfied are you with GNOME?

Barely, Completely, Halfway, Mostly, Not At All

Have you contributed to the GNOME project?

No, Yes

But it appears I was also wrong; contributors to the project have roughly the same opinion as the non-contributors.

There is a much more clear differentiator tough: people that have tried to contact the project, unsuccessfully.

Overall, how satisfied are you with GNOME?

Barely, Completely, Halfway, Mostly, Not At All

Have you ever contacted the GNOME team?

No, I don’t know how; No, never had the need; Yes, successfully; Yes, unsuccessfully

The people that have tried to contact the project unsuccessfully tend to say either they are barely satisfied, or not at all with GNOME. Of all the people that have contacted the project 2/3 of them say it was unsatisfactory. This should be worrying.

And then, people that like to use another window manager.

Overall, how satisfied are you with GNOME?

Barely, Completely, Halfway, Mostly, Not At All

Have you ever contacted the GNOME team?

Yes, successfully; Yes, unsuccessfully; No, I don’t know how; No, never had the need

Clearly GNOME has problems interacting with other window managers. Or at least people seem to think so.

What needs to change?

Unfortunately there was no easy way to ask GNOME users this question so it was more or less open form, and that’s very difficult to analyze, however, I’ve taken the time to read them one by one, and count them, and so far I have 20% of the 10000 responses, but I doubt reading the rest will change the results much. I will try to do so in the future, as time permits, but I don’t promise much.

Better customization (397)

This is by far the most requested, people don’t want to manually fiddle with gconf/dconf, extensions, or gnome-tweak, they want a whole lot more options integrated. One suggestion was to have an advanced mode, which is something I have suggested in the past, but GNOME developers are adamant against it for no rational reasons.

Not only do people want more options, but they think some of the current ones are useless, and that defaults are all wrong. They also want more options for power management, like deciding what happens when you close the lid. Also more options to change the appearance: font, icons, keyboard bindings, screensaver, etc. Also, disable the accessibility stuff.

GNOME 2 (113)

People love their GNOME 2. A lot of them suggested to have two interfaces, others requested to improve the fallback mode, but most of them demanded to get rid of GNOME shell directly. A lot of people also asked to bring back the GNOME 2 panel, and taskbar.

Improve performance and footprint (89)

A lot people think GNOME is too bloated and asked for better performance, less CPU usage, less memory usage, smoother animations, faster start-up times, etc. Specially the ones that have used GNOME shell, which apparently is a resource hog.

Nautilus (57)

People are definitely not happy with nautilus. They complain it’s too slow, takes too much time to start, and lacks a lot functionality. Many suggested to get rid of it and use some of the already existing alternatives.

Notifications (46)

The new notifications are annoying; one shouldn’t need to move the mouse cursor the corner to see them; that makes it easy to miss them, which defeats the purpose of a notification.

Shutdown / Restart / Suspend (44)

This is a no-brainer; just add this option. Yes, you can see them by pressing “alt” but people don’t want that, there’s no excuse to remove basic functionality, and users are complaining hard for this particular feature.

Improve theming (32)

Users want better themes and icons, they don’t like the default theme, also want a dark theme, and also think the amount of customization a theme can achieve is not enough.

Better multi-monitor support (32)

Another very requested feature was to improve multi-monitor support.

Others (in order)

• Improve Evolution
• Listen to users
• Reduce dependencies (specially PulseAudio)
• Improved reliability / stability
• Minimize / Mazimize
• Tiling
• Get rid of Evolution (or split the calendar component
• alt+tab
• Faster shell search
• Collaborate more with other communities
• Fix ATI fglrx issues
• Integrate Zeitgeist
• Render KDE apps seamlessly
• Reduce dead space
• Compiz compatibility
• Developer attitude

Conclusion

What is clear is that most people want more configuration options, a lot liked GNOME 2 much better than GNOME 3, and they want an option to have an interface similar to GNOME 2 with GNOME 3 technology. For every user that likes GNOME 3, there is one that hates it. There’s plenty of people that think they are ignored by GNOME developers, and that users are treated like idiots (and they don’t like that). Users want a better attitude from the developers, not only toward users, but towards other FOSS projects like KDE (GTK+ apps like fine under KDE, Qt apps don’t under GNOME), and less of the not-invented-here syndrome.

Hopefully it has become clear to rational people that there is some value in the results of this survey, even if GNOME developers reject it. All the known biases were identified, and fortunately the ones that could cause non-response bias didn’t do so, so the results are valid and nobody was underrepresented 🙂

The next survey will incorporate some of the findings here, and hopefully more people would be aware of the need to reach people that normally wouldn’t answer this survey. Perhaps at some point GNOME developers would accept that there is no significative non-response bias because of that and start listening to the results.