Re: A proposal for a friendlier Emacs

[Ergus]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 08:19:58PM +0300, Jean Louis wrote:
> * Ergus <spacibba@aol.com> [2020-09-20 03:45]:
> > There have been too many years of licences nobody reads and msoffice useless 
> > splash. So people now install the programs just pressing next next next accept.
> >
> > The problem is that 90% of the cases the information there is pretty useless 
> > (publicity, license, offers for an account) so most people assume that in our 
> > case it will be the same and usually ignores that.
>
> I am not sure how you come to seach information, as it is very
> general. I could present Emacs to various people and see if they have
> read the splash screen, and then after 5 or 10 attempts, I could have
> statistics, who read what, if they found that there is Tutorial or
> not, or what else they remembered and if they have read the splash
> page.
>
> With 100 people in the test, such information would be valuable
> statistics.

> Without mass of people tested randomly, it is harder to say that splash
> is useless for people because it was maybe useless for one msoffice
> user.
>
> I can speak for myself, as it is hard to speak for others, so I know
> that I was reading licenses of proprietary software before 1999, and I
> know that I was reading everything that Emacs had to offer, from
> splash screen, Tutorials in few languages, and GNU news and anything
> else, I did read it, and that is how I got fascinated with the free
> software.
So you are probably more the exception than the rule. As you can see
nobody these days reads the licenses anymore, not even the tutorials
(just give a look to quora questions and reddit) except professionals of
course. If they have read the licenses probably they won't be using
facebook, WP or any google service or install in their phones so many
applications full of publicity and give it access anything including
personal contacts and location. They just click yes and want it to be
working asap

I don't have anything opposed to the splash screen and I don't consider
that this kind of users are the main profile emacs should be interested
in to attract. I just say that nobody knows what is written in the
license or the splash screen. Consider also that most of the people in
the world are nor English speakers either.

> --
> Thanks,
> Jean Louis