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Whistler vs. KDE/Gnome
Goatbert writes "I just posted a comparison of Windows Whistler to KDE, Gnome and Mandrake Update on NewsForge. It tries to compare Whistler's User Interface/Update feature to KDE and Gnome."
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Yes, and I disabled it as soon as I figured how to. Click on a folder with 30+ gifs, jpegs, or other graphics and you get the delay while it opens them all up and scales a thumbnail out of it. Not interested, maybe later.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Very true.
> Windows Explorer is pretty flexible when it comes to shell extensions and folder templates.
:-)
Yeah, I know. I've dabbled with shell extensions in Visual C++ and Delphi. VC++ YUCK, COM in C++ is a holy mess with all the macros and stuff. I'm using Delphi exclusively nowadays.
I bought a book on the Windows registry, it's amazing how much you can achieve just by fiddling with the registy, without any programming at all.
It would be great if the address bar could also function as a command line, sort of like the old DOS4Win (or something like that). Now go make it so
What do you think? :-)
> On a command line, even after a DIR or LS, you still have to type the name of the viewer app.
Not entirely true. Debian, for example has the commands 'view' and 'edit' that are supposed to open the file with correct program based on its MIME type (the same that the GUIs do).
>it's RIGHT THERE, in front of you, you want to point to it and grab it.
I don't want to "grab" it. When I'm using the keyboard (most of the time I write something), I hate to move my hand to the rodent. With an archaic command line, it'd be annoying to write a long file name, but fortunately we have tab completion. If the system could just read my thoughts or sight...
> Selecting a bunch of files. Here the GUI can get quite awkward or useless.
Actually, GUI can be good for selecting multiple files that have no connection between their names, but the advantage to command line is marginal if there is such.
> A lot of people would disagree with this statement, myself included. I can remember how to get to someone's house, but I rarely remember the street name.
See, you have given a name: "someone's house". This is an abstract "high-level" name. Street names - which I don't remember by the way - are detailed, precise names and more like file system paths.
I tend to remember the commands I use (abstract name) more than randomly but I don't remember every single option to them (detailed name). I do know a way (path) to get to what I want (man). One can see this as three layers: abstract name > path > detailed name. GUIs are mostly missing the highest level. (But that's just one man's interpretation.)
And no, the CLI isn't optimal and implementations not very consistent but the GUI, as it is, is much, much worse. It may be more intuitive at first but it is restrictive and certainly not efficient. Why spend time moving hand to the moused browsing through menus (or try to remember key bindings that are often too many to be intuitive) when I can just intuitively write \section{Foobar}. If I don't remember it, then only search through the help.
>On a command line, even after a DIR or LS, you still have to type the name of the viewer app (and potentially its full path) as well as the name of the document, even though it's RIGHT THERE, in front of you, you want to point to it and grab it
Not true.. under the MS command line, you can use "start document.ext" and it will do the same thing as double-clicking document.ext.
The book "The Elements of Style" answers your question better than I can.
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
I think you're right on target. As much as I like and use Unix every day, until the major players in the unix space (sendmail, the guys at ISC, samba, kde, gnome, linux distros, and so on) decide to come up with the end-all-be-all config file formats that a single application can be made to understand easily, we'll never see decent system configuration tools.
Each config manager has to know how to work with a bunch of different config files that use different grammars, structures and so on, which pretty much means writing it from scratch and its usually done by someone totally unrelated to the application or service being configured.
Yes, I know that XML is supposed to save us from this madness but thusfar I haven't seen a mad rush to embrace XML.
Maybe it's just a matter of time, but it'd be great to see a little more unity in the config file world -- this is a really basic step towards simpler configurability and usability.
But, the advantage to copying MS' interface is that most people that I'm assuming the KDE/Gnome people want to 'convert' already know and understand the MS interface. Apple's is better, granted, but it also has a learning curve. Anyone firing up KDE or Gnome for the first time who's used a PC in the past 5 years will for the most part, understand what's going on.
fscking hey!! i am w/ ya on that one....
Nautilus shows previews of text in files in the icon itself. You can zoom in and out to get more or less information, or individually stretch an icon or shrink it. Image files also are previewed as thumbnails. And you can listen to mp3's in the icon view with a mouse-over. Or you can convert a directory into a virtual album by switching to the music view. That's just the tip of the iceberg. There are other views and you can write your own. Of course, these can be disabled for performance issues or personal taste.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
Windows vs. KDE vs. Gnome. Always the same song. And sincerly, do you really care about it? I prefer to have analysis where 80% is about the quality/crap of the system itself and only 20% about comparing things against each other. Yes, because the author then wouldn't forget that exist:
WindowMaker
AfterStep
IceWm
XFce
BlackBox
And several other wm's with a more or less level of features, completeness, stability and many things more. As a pro I prefer the WindowMaker/AfterStep interface. Sincerly it is irritating for me to have a piece of crap on the bottom ALWAYS telling me what I have in my computer. Well, it's my comp, I installed it, I know what's inside. So why I need this "start" menu??? I launch a termnial and get EVERY program I need. Besides I don't need the oversuperfluous amount of features that either Gnome or KDE give. I need my programs to work and not an interface for playing cosmetics. Besides, if anyone wants to use something REALLY beautiful then try Enlightenment. Yeah it is less usable than all others. But even I, sometimes, launch it just to see the beauty of a piece of computer art in full motion. Just by its artitistic power, Enlightenment deserves a big place.
Besides, these KDE/GNOME (and Whistler included) interfaces are hugely bloated. They eat several times more memory than WindowMaker and others. Besides they are slower. For compilations and high processing power, they are an overload. so why do I need them?
I just cannot believe that this represents the best efforts of UI PhDs. I have yet to see an innovative change in GUI's since 1995. The Explorer integration in Win98 was interesting, but ultimately lame (but at least they tried something somewhat new).
Everytime I think of innovation in UI, I think of the demo I got of Netscape 5.0. No, not mozilla... the 5.0 that existed purely in concepts given to the Netscape marketing droids to come and show us (I was at Ford Motor at the time). They did a demo with Mozilla as this omni-app, basically a shell replacement... it had pop-up windows, tabs all over the place, etc. It was totally different from the Windows UI, and it had a lot of interesting features.
Ford shot it down in flames. The meeting was a disaster. Why?
"That doesn't look like Windows."
Grrr... how sad to be trapped in a "worst is best" situation.
(And, as you can see, the Mozilla-as-your-desktop concept never went anywhere. Too bad, it could have at least offered as much as litestep does)
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
There is no clear winner or loser. Each interface has its advantages and disadvantages. Windows doesn't have a bad interface -- and it shouldn't, because Microsoft has put millions upon millions of dollars into making sure Whistler isn't the next "Bob." Gnome and KDE, on the other hand, have managed to put together very useable interfaces without millions of dollars behind them. All three interfaces need work to become as user friendly as possible, and all three can learn from each other.
/. know most of the commands to every major OS that's in use, but keep in mind that a new user to Linux may not know how to mount a floppy disk drive, and may want some type of interface or program to guide him/her through the process.
I agree with this 100%. If software manufacturers wish to make money, then they must cater to the majority of users. This is where most of their profits come from (if the manufacturer is not distributing freely under the GPL, i.e. Micro$oft). I'm sure that most of the people who read and contribute to
I have no complaints about the MS Windows GUI, though I still spend a great deal of my time on the command line. I think MS did a very good job stealing^H^H^H^H^H designing the overall layout. However, Microsoft deserves every bit of critism heaped upon them for the lack of stability in the underlying OS.
The Unix GUIs, in my opinion, are too flexible. You heard me right. Too flexible. Everybody has a different idea of how things should be done and so programs such as KDE are designed to accomodate virtually every conceivable idea. And everybody wants to make their programs a little different by using the GUI in a unique way. In a GUI, unique is a bad thing.
This results in too much inconsistency. I believe it doesn't really matter how you design your GUI, so long as you do it the same way all the time. Right clicking on a file may seem intuitive to you and I, but a newbie is as likely to right click as to drop to to the command line to run grep. But the newbie will learn he can right-click. In fact, he'll start right-clicking on everything. The original design could have been "hover the mouse cursor over the icon and press TAB". It doesn't matter, but be damn certain you do it that way, and only that way throughout the interface.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Name 10 original UI interface ideas that MS has come up with, that MS didn't themselves copy from someone else. Hint: the start menu is *not* one of them.
Bah. The only useful items in the review are the screenshots. The verbage around them is author's bad attempt at guessing how "novice users" think.
The conclusion does not follow out of any facts whatsoever, and seems to have been added as an afterthought. The last paragraph is a collection of cliches, and the fact that it says "windows is ok" does not make it more "grown up"!
The author's idea was good. But he needs to get a couple of *real* novice users in front of his computer, observe each of them for a while, and *then* tell us what they think!
A follow-up article with this information, confirming or denying his original opinion, would be a good idea.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
There was a GEOS for the Commodore 64.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
yup, it's sad but true. once all these linux stocks collapse, my poor redhat server will cease to function. it's a shame too, my uptime had been doing so well.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Whistler vs. WindowMaker? *I* know who would win...
Hmm, so it seem like you like Apple. I happened to prefer MS interface much more so who is right , me or you ?
Just type "start filename.ext" and Windows will pick the proper viewer app. Load up 4DOS instead of COMMAND.COM and you can configure it to load the viewer app for you (and you won't need to include the extension, either). I understand NT has somewhat implemented this capability.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Okay, this has been one of my pet peeves for a while now. Mainly, I hate start menus. This isn't specific to the "Windows" start button, it extends to the Gnome foot, the big ugly K and the Apple menu. The problem lies within the reliance on mouse positioning to keep the menu open. On desktop machines this isn't such a problem, you can generaly keep pretty good control over your mouse, provided you don't sneeze or are not attacked by a vagrant feline. But then there's laptops. It's a pain in the arse to keep the cursor on a start menu when you're using a touch pad. Maybe I just have fat fingers, but it's just no fun. A better solution is a more CDE like interface ala XFce. Click the menu, it's open, click the item in the menu and the menu closes, your selection executes. In between the first and the second click you could traverse your mouse cursor around the screen twice and do the lambada for all XFce cares.
This feature has been discussed on the www.kde.org forum a while ago.
By the way, MS stole this one from BeOS.....
Johan V.
So, will "Whistler's mother" be the default wallpaper?
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Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Congratulations, you have proven that Red Hat 7.0 sucks.
/proc. Some device names are included there, but I don't see how far you can get in troubleshooting if you don't know what kinds of devices you're using in the first place.
However, the article was comparing Whistler with KDE and GNOME, not any specific distro. When I installed KDE 1.1 for the first time (on top of RH 5.2), the K menu didn't have any of those "half-finished CD writers" or "toys," just the core set of applications - kedit, kmail, etc. About the same amount as was included with my default Windows installation. Never mind that you have the option to not install these in the first place...
As for the NIC trouble, the only useful pieces of information I've ever found in the system controls are the names of the devices I'm using and the IRQs/DMAs they occupy. The latter info is located in KDE's own system controls section, echoed from
And if you really, really want to install software from the net rather than from the CDs your distro includes, I don't think anyone is keeping you from going to freshmeat.net to get what you need. Again, this is also distro-specific.
Bah, I've wasted too much time responding to this...
I wonder who these articles are written for? It can't be aimed at new or prospective linux users, since it basically says that whistler is much better than KDE or Gnome.
In any case, the good thing about both Gnome and KDE is that if anyone wants any of those windows features, they can be coded in in a night.
go open source, baby!
Leading the partnership for a Slashdot-Free Slashdot, Son of Dog
Both MS and Apple saw the Xerox PARC stuff and wanted to make their own versions. MS knew what Apple was doing, and for a while tried to be different just to be different; for example, Windows 1.x didn't have overlapping windows, but rather tiled windows. I don't know what MS was thinking -- trying to keep Apple happy? Trying to differentiate their product?
But don't forget that Apple really, really wanted MS to support the struggling new Mac platform. MS, well aware that Windows could compete with the Mac someday when they got it right, demanded that Apple sign an agreement: if MS ported applications like Word and Multiplan to the Mac, Apple would not sue MS for features in MS Windows. Apple signed the agreement, and MacWord and MacMultiplan helped sell the Mac platform among businesses. (Then, a few years later, Apple sued MS over Windows anyway, and eventually the entire lawsuit was thrown out because of the agreement.)
So, given the above history, you would understand how completely betrayed MS must have felt when Apple sued them after agreeing not to sue them.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
This method is extremely quick. I also use 4NT (shell replacement) when I need to do command line stuff. Some things are just easier from the command line, and 4NT has [Tab] filename completion (the only indispensable CLI tool IMO).
:)
In HKEY_CURRENT_USERS, search for "CompletionChar". Set this to '0x09'.
Hey presto - Tab filename completion without having to get 4NT
You can also download TweakUI to get it too.
Si
Coming soon - pyrogyra
What sort of users do you think we are??? Who uses a UI only because it is themable?
I find myself rather insulted by your post. KDE and GNOME are coming along quite quickly in development and provide advanced features that I use constantly-- multiple desktops being the primary example. These are not a matter of aesthetics, nor of simple ease of use but rather of real utility.
Yes Whistler, and for that matter W98 and 2k are well polished compared to KDE or Gnome, but there are some things that Gnome and KDE can offer as well. Polish is not everything.
True I have the habit of running many apps at once (I am running 26 now on this W2k box) but the single workspace model becomes way too crowded. I hope to (someday soon) work entirely off a Gnome box for this reason.
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Use Linux or BSD and you can avoid the Windows BSOD
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I use Windows on one box, Linux on another, a hacked together variant of Minix on a third. For graphics design I have an apple cube. I use each of them, and like all of them equally, with the exception of the Minix one, which sucks, because nobody makes software for it. The problem that I see here is that people do not truely understand the nature of each windowing system.
:), most likely a windowing system which you understand very well. If it's windows 98, you probably understand the control panel and the system.ini files. If you're using 2000/NT4, you probably understand the CLI, and how to modify the config files. If you're using KDE or GNOME, you probably understand the command prompt and the configuration manager. If you're using Enlightenment, you like having lots of xterms :). However, the problem is not that you don't religiously know the benefits of your own windowing system, but that you haven't used other windowing systems long enough to understand their benefits.
You are reading this from your own windowing system, (unless you use lynx, and then you are very cool
Example: If you use Linux at home, and go to work on Win2k boxen, you won't learn all of the good things abou Win2k, because you will always be comparing it to Linux. Your instincts hold you back from fully using it, because you are sure that it can't do anything better, or different, than Linux, and that if it does, it does the thing worse.
The problem is you. Spend some time learning Windows, or MacOS, or BeOS, or GNOME, or KDE, or Enlightenment. The real power of all of them only becomes apparent when you approach them with an open mind, looking for how you can best use them. For example, I have written a switcher program for my Windows box to switch between LiteStep and the MS Windows gui/shell. LiteStep allows me to customize Windows nearly as much as the Linux equivalents do, and Windows provides me with a larger market of software and drivers. Don't complain when you can embrace and extend.
I hate any gui with a taskbar and start button and i find it difficult to believe an average person couldn't operate a computer without one. if the computer was obviously turned on, and somebody who has ever used a computer before sat down and stared at a blank screen with no icons or anything, how long would it take them to click a mouse button?
/apple menu/Kmenu/gnome foot gives you a constant spot from which to quickly find the programs you use most often or to search through menus for that program that you use occasiionally and can't remember the name of but you know it's somewhere in one of he submenus. The biggest advantage of it is that it is always in the same spot and it is in a corner so you can just flick the mouse to the spot and click.
Your point being? The point of things like the start menu/button and the taskbar is to help people use the computer. By having a taskbar, you can easily see what programs you have open and switch between them quickly. Yes you can use key combos to cycle through open apps, but the taskbar can be faster in a lot of cases.
The start menu
The people who design GUI interfaces have tried a number of things, and these two elements are common to just about every one of them that I have tried. There is a good reason for this. The best GUIs provide these elements as well as keyboard shortcuts and conextual menus.
What exactly do you hate about having these methods available?
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
>Window's UI is hardly useable for daily work
I think that's pretty harsh. I use Win2K all day every day and must say I find it pretty good. The stability versus 98 is incredible. Certainly on a par with the RH 6.2 box that sits right next to it (i.e., neither crashes, ever. Even though I run pre-alpha deep in development software all day on the Win2K box).
Unlike most people I use "My Computer" windows (i.e., no explorer list of folders in a seperate pane) to browse through my hard drive. I barely touch the mouse after double clicking on the shortcut on my desktop to the correct directory. I simply type the first few letters of each directory I want to go to, then hit Enter. Backspace to reverse up the dir tree. Drill down to the file I want, hit Enter to launch it (I have all my file associations set properly... I find this is easier to manage under Win2K as well).
This method is extremely quick. I also use 4NT (shell replacement) when I need to do command line stuff. Some things are just easier from the command line, and 4NT has [Tab] filename completion (the only indispensable CLI tool IMO).
All in all, this is a good work environment!
grib.
maybe
While a comparison between Whistler and KDE/Gnome is interesting and useful, we should not forget that there may be better ways to do user interfaces than whatever MS dreams up. Reading the article, you might thing that MS invented the task bar and start menu. They just moved the MacOS menu bar from the top to the bottom of the screen, and put "Start" in the place of the apple logo.
Granted, MS does have a huge development staff, and is likely to have put considerable effort and research into their designs, but then, their marketing department probably has a lot to say about their design also, and they are certainly not above changing the interface in a way that says "I'm new, buy me or be old fashioned" regardless of how useable it really is.
The unspoken subtext of this article is "What are the chances of (KDE/Gnome) finally kicking MS butt in the marketplace? Can we catch them on the next release cycle?". Free software should not be about trying to beat commercial software in the marketplace. It should be about finding new and better ways of meeting practical computing needs..
bah.. go find a Mac user and ask them about usability. You'll get a lecture on "infinite clickspace" and "persistence" and other such junk. That's what usability is about, not how pretty the damn thing looks. Personally I find it boring as crap but if you are going to argue it you really need to understand what it is you are arguing.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Umm... are you under the impression that KDE is a whole new idea or something?
KDE is a linux / XFree implimentation of the Common Desktop Environment. Look at a Solaris or HP/UX box. See the little drawer thingy? That's where they both got the idea. It is frankly very impressive to see what the KDE folks have done using ugly, nasty old CDE as a base. I'm sticking to Helix Gnome for now, but its' getting to be a difficult choice.
Good work is happening everywhere right now.
original, OK. But what about the CLONE of Windows that is KDE?
original, OK. But what about the CLONE of Apple that is Windows?
original, OK. But what about the CLONE of Alto that is Apple
Why would it even be relevant who thought of it first? Its about as relevant as "My Dad can beat up your Dad" chanted in a school-yard.
Another problem is that many "Joe Users" never use the (m$ windows) help system, because it is not well structured (just get some Joe Users and ask them - chances are you will hear something along "I cannot find any useful help there"). I don't think that the Gnome/KDE help systems are much better.
The way Linux vendors modify the desktop menues does not help either. E.g. SuSE puts in a "SuSE" menue into the KDE menue. It is quite confusing that some apps might be found under "Applications" but others under "Suse".
Rather than waiting for the next cool feature from M$, and copy it, it would be interesting to get hold of a few "Joe Users", and ask them what they like/dislike most in existing interfaces (e.g.: menues are good - submenues are bad - subsubmenues are plain evil - based on performing this experiment).
"What will happen then, is complete speculation. If Microsoft continue to dumb down their $80 version of windows, I can see a growing market in replacement shells for windows"
Less probable that this will happen. For the pro's, a more ideal desktop system is the one that sticks with windows manipulation, performance and less with such things like "Start menu". An example of this is WindowMaker. On Windows there is its twin-brother: LightStep. I don't know its present status, but for nearly a year I witnessed a long and painful path of evolution, where LightStep tried to overcome the all-embedded-in-one world of Windows. I saw how betas balanced on stability, performance and features. I saw the headaches developers had on working NT and 98. It seemed that LightStep would be doomed to be an eternal beta. Sometime ago i noted that the project is still alive. But it seems that is not so popular as before and still fights its beta status. After nearly 3 or 4 years.
So you may imagine what will happen to replacement shells. Besides there is also a problem they may force users to stick into traditional desktop. M$ is removing most chances, if not all, to use a command line terminal. Without it, it will be pretty hard to see other desktops in Windows, as they should be quite complete to fit on a cascade of dialog windows and other diagnostic stuff. Without a clear information about the backstages of the system it will be very hard to make beta
tests of such soft.
In resume. User is doomed to be dumb.
Sure.. but the reason MS didn't have overlapping windows was because it was just too damned hard. It took the genius of Jeff Raskin to figure out an efficient way to do resizable and movable overlapping windows. Microsoft for a long time had no idea how to interface a mouse. They relied on hardware cursors and it was only after working with the Apple API that they figured out how to do software bitmaped cursors.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Everybody argues how innovative Microsoft is in general, and who invented the Start button. The funny thing that Geoworks did a couple decades ago. Does anybody remember a revolutionary OS called GEOS? It was Windows 95 when Windows was text based, and it ran on a 286! An Geoworks stole a lot of thier ideas from Macintosh, and Macintosh stole a lot of thier ideas from the Xerox Palo Alto REsearch Center, who had no idea what they owned. James B.
http://james.nontrivial.org
/I/ don't want to pick up the manual. I want it to do things for me. I stopped caring about the kernel and device drivers many years ago, when I discovered Diablo and my Linux partition faded into obscurity. For now, and the foreseeable future, Windows is the best system for me. (Although Mac OS X is looking kinda nice...) It is minimum thinking with maximum fun. For the most part, the interface on every program is.. the same! This pleases me to no end (and I like my Start button :(
Well, according to the way Microsoft thinks its users are, they'd never get it. But to be honest, why would someone who's never used a computer before think to take the funny-looking paperweight with a cord on it, slide it around the desk, make the connection that moving the paperweight also moves a little arrow on the screen, and then go to the button labeled 'start' and click on it? (All right, I'm exagerrating here, but not by too much. The Windows UI really isn't much more 'intuitive' than the command prompt; it's just prettier.) And then, 'advanced' users end up getting saddled with these training wheels designed for beginners.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Call me when you've read more than the nickle version of computer interface history and we might have an intelligent discussion
You want to back up your implied knowledge on computer interface history here with some facts + references? You're quick to say that MS is innovating, but you don't give any examples. Please, I invite you to show us the list of UI innovations that MS came up with themselves. For a company that spends $5bil a year on R&D, show us what it's produced. And please, give us examples of things that *are* actually original, *not* copied concepts like the start menu. I personally can't think of a single thing in Windows UI design that hadn't been done before on X WM's, OS2, Mac's, Xerox, or outlined in various twenty year old UI design articles. MFC toolbars can't even handle more than 16 color bitmaps, I for one do not associate that sort of crap with a company that pushes any UI envelops.
As far as I can tell re gnome and kde, they seem to be trying to copy many of the things I've always regarded as the *worst* aspects of windows. For example, the gnome file manager. I thought it was great news when I heard they were using midnight commander as the base, ms is a well-thought out, useful file manager. I was disgusted when I learnt that they'd removed most of what was *good* about mc, and degraded it into some sort of Windows Explorer clone, complete with many of the absolutely bad things about WE. Windows Explorer is not my idea of a target worth aiming at.
So I'm not disagreeing with you that the gnome/kde people copy ideas a lot (sometimes for the worse, they seem to copy ideas sometimes without first asking themselves if they *should*). But to claim that MS is springing forth some non-negligible number of innovations that they're copying borders on ridiculous.
Yeah! How are we supposed to stay motivated without any propoganda about how much better the quality is of the software we as a community can produce, as opposed to the most powerful software company in the entire universe???
... all the intellectually challenged slashdotters.
...
I want to read that Microsoft is stupid. Can't you all just take that into account the next time you try to review something objectively?
btw; I do not speak for myself, but on behalf of my boss, my cat, my girlfriend and off course
On a more serious note: I am truely fighting myself not to bonk my head on the doorpost every time my flatmates tell me how much better Windows(recent/future version) is because it has fading everthings
Ha
That was funny:
This seems more user friendly, although a "recently used programs" option would be quite nice, and is a good idea on Microsoft's part, if not a completely original one.
It is a good thing to compare Gnome, KDE, Whistler, but don't forget about Mac's existance. Mac had the idea of Recently Used Applications for a long time. How is it possible, that a person who chooses to compare several GUIs does not know about that?
http://dtum.livejournal.com
Very good point seeing the system that Apple saw at PARC (actually they secured a few of the employees and ex-employees but we'll stick with Myth shall we?) didn't even have moving or resizable windows. What I thought was funny was that perhaps the best thing there, the object oriented language Smalltalk, was completely ignored by Apple. Now, if you saw the crap that Microsoft was making before they stopped off at Apple one day (can we say DOS Shell and Windows 1.0?) you would understand how completely ripped Apple must of felt.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I find it really interesting that Windows, which has always prided itself on ease of use and less on stability is finally making its way up the ladder toward actually having a more robust system. On the other hand, we have Linux, which has prided itself on stability first, working its way DOWN the ladder to the lowest common denominator of a user.
:)
Notice the trend? Microsoft starts with crap and cruft and makes it better, Linux starts with a very good OS and dumbs it down.
Now the very cool part is that we are finally starting to see the two (or three if you want to be picky) OSs start to meet each other in a middle ground. Linux is obviously garnering the brighter windows users as time goes by. The tools in Linux continue to become much more user-friendly whereas windows does not really make news tools, merely reinvents them over and over. The fact of the matter is, the momentum behind the desktop wars is now starting to speed up. My guess is that by the time KDE hits 4.0 there will be little to discern Linux from Windows when it comes to desktop appearances alone.
I guess I have a point, if you read it again you may be able to figure it out as well
Cheers
Hammer of Truth
Technically Apple's GUI is nothing like Xerox's. They got the idea for a GUI there, but the WIMP enviornment created at their labs is an all Apple affair.
...and I'm not sure we should trust this Kyle Sagan either.
Mircosoft didn't just rip off the GUI idea, they stole the interface for it too.
Next time before spouting off take a look at your sources? Have you actually seen a working interface from one of those research boxen at Xerox. Sounds like a no...
Almost every cool thing they've added has come from BeOS. The kill task on exit, Be. Open With menu in Explorer, Be. Now with Whistler the new multiple instances of one app combined, well Be did that back in 4.0. I feel like on of those Mac people now but Windows 2001 = Be 98.
Why is it when Microsoft does ANYTHING it's eithet "revolutionary" or "evolving to something better." It' looks like a step backwards, space hog, ugly as sin interface to me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not MS bashing (completely), I've finally broken down and installed Windows this year myself. They are getting a bit better. But, what they are doing is slowly changing the GUI to make it look new, while keeping it similar enough to not confuse everyone.
To speak about KDE and Gnome as an "environment" (not a toolkit) you have to realize, they are LIMITED by the ability of the USERS to understand the interface. OF F$#$@ COURSE they look and act like Windows, because "everyone knows how MS Windows Works." As inovative as they could be is still limited to what the average MS Windows user can figure out what to do.
Next Generation Desktops most likely are NOT going to come from Microsoft refining thier GUI. The newer cooler stuff seems to be with window managers like Enlightenment (gag... Ok, NEW? F$#@, I've used it on and off for how many years and it's STILL BETA?!?)
Screw you guys, I'm going home! (ala Cartman) TWM baby! Face it, even FVWM was only limited by the fact it did WAY MORE than most people could figure out how to configure.... and FVWM is HOW old???
If Mac OS X can be as good as everyone says it is/will be I have little doubt that Gnome/KDE will both be exceptional GUI UIs in due time.
Arent you people tired of this ridiculous debate?
Horrible cliche: Rome wasnt built in a day. but very accurate...
Why get 'down' on the KDE/Gnome teams? I say simply: "Keep up the good work and good luck" - and no I am not pandering.
You mean the Next interface, not the Windowmaker one. WM is a cheap rip off. NeXT at least had all the applications following the same design.
:D )
Go try a Next (or neXT or NeXT or whatever) out and come back to windowmaker and cry at how they butchered the finest interface ever made.
(i left out the crying part personally, but you seem to like windows so you must be a wussy
Linux will let you do this. Just don't install all the optional packages. The start menu is filled with crap I've never heard of.
Yes, it's a whole different operating system. If you've never used linux, you've probably never heard of a lot of the apps. It's just different - don't expect it to be the same as windows. In Windows, I click on "Windows Update..." and get system patches for bugs, security holes, etc. I'm not aware of a simple method under Red Hat.
Run 'up2date'. It's better than Windows Update.
You make a good point about hardware configuration, though...
> Can we buy a clue here? For all the sniping
> people do on how "unoriginal" MS/Windows is, as
> near as I can tell the entire KDE and Gnome
> approach is to just copy MS. So of course they
> don't have to spend money to get the same
> results.
I'm sorry that you wrote this, but you did. I was using HPUX w/ a variety of popup menus in 1988, and it had been around for awhile then. Before win 1.0 I believe. You are talking about systems here, and you are just plain wrong -- windowing GUI systems are all basically the same when you walk up to them.
> "All three" aren't learning from each other --
> both are learning from Windows. There's only one
> UI that has any real R&D and UI testing dollars
> behind it, and it dowesn't have a footprint or K
> as an icon.
MS spends a lot of stolen money for very little improvement in the UI, I'll certainly admit that. As far as testing, Gnome and KDE are fairly stable products, so they probably do a lot of testing. Obviously they spend very little on R&D.
> When Win95 came out, all people did was complain
> about how stupid the start button is, now we
> read comparisons that say "well, KDE and Gnome
> both have start buttons, so they're just as good
> as Windows, I don't know where MS is wasting all
> that money."
Sure, we read it, but how hard is it to make popup, cascading menus in early X w/ twm? Or to pull down menus from the early Macs' menu bar? I've always throught the start button was dumb. If KDE and Gnome had no foot or K, I guess I'd use an icon to launch a menu system or use popups. I don't really care.
> So we can bitch and moan about how imperfect and
> stupid MS interfaces are, but quite frankly
> there are only two companies that can claim any
> moral high ground for actually advancing the UI
> outside of ripping off MS: Apple and Palm. They
> are the only companies I see actually doing NEW
> things as opposed to "me-too"...
popup menus, available all the back to the early history of X and twm, are the basis of the later menubar extension and then led to the "stay down"/"stay up" appearance of Microsoft's "Start Menu", which was done by others before it ended up in Microsoft's lower left corner of win95.
I have no idea why you are so interested in distorting the history of menu systems, popups, or the general thrashing of systems and UIs which have an lineage far removed from any microsoft product, but you do -- you made a very shaky post, so you have to deal with the consequences and innaccuracies of same.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Are the types hardcoded or is it a generic 'plug-in' type model? E.g. if I wanted to create a .3ds model previewer that worked with nautilus, could I? Just asking .. I've wanted a file manager that worked like this from the first time I used ACDSee .. actually set out to develop one myself at some stage, but never took it very far.
It looks to me that OSs (Whistler, Mac X) are congregating towards larger icons and a more user-friendly interface. This will help my Mom check her e-mail and the likes, lol. Personally I like it and I can't wait until the real product arrives on the shelves. Nice Article!
-- Kleptotherapy: Helping those who help themselves.
Anyone of the other companies that are into Linux support. That's the beauty of it.
In this light I would say: ok, use Windows. But don't mess with Linux anymore. Because Linux is not a Windows substitute. It is ANOTHER system. And whatever the media cries about thiis, it is THEIR problem. Specially some /. people.
Linux is not Win^2, or Anti-Win, or Win(-1) or anything else. It is "crunch-Win" when M$ whistleblowers try to overcome its territory. However, on the rest it is a quite peaceful system that lives along with Solaris, BSD and other *NIX cousins.
2,5 years I scrapped the last piece of Windows I had. And till now I haven't seen that I'm loosing something on M$ stuff, except games. But I can live without them. You may not live on Linux the same way I can't live on Windows. As far as no one touches each other's "domain of use" we may peacefully live. Unfortunately Redmond's horde cannot live too long without another OS war.
2. Selecting a bunch of files. Here the GUI can get quite awkward or useless. If the selection criterion is simple enough, it might be workable: select all files starting with project1*, for example. Sort by name, select the relevant files. But if the selection pattern is more complex, that might not work. You really have the urge to type something like SELECT *YAHOO* in the address bar, that would be so much easier.
Windows Explorer is pretty flexible when it comes to shell extensions and folder templates. In fact, you've given me a pretty good idea for a quick weekend project. Ideally it should support both regular expressions and globbing.
Check out http://msdn.micro sof t.com/library/periodic/period00/w2kui2.htm for how do do stuff like this!
Windows is incredibly flexible and programmable, it's just not always as obvious as *nix window managers.
Um how about this instead.
Phew, someone else that feels the way I do. I use a 667 MHz Pentium III with 512 MB of RAM and a GeForce2 at work, and Windows is horribly slow on it. It can't even keep up with my keypresses in applications like Visual Studio and Microsoft Word (MS Word is particularly bad.) It often does absolutely *nothing* for a good twenty seconds or so while I'm typing before keypresses are responded to, normally in bursts.) It's terrible. Clicking on the Windows Explorer shortcut I wait a good 10 to 40 seconds for flipping Windows Explorer to start. If I was Joe User and I'd forked over all that money myself I would be most PO and demand some sort of refund or at the very least an explanation for why my system is so unresponsive .. but I guess Joe User doesn't have the computer knowledge and doesn't know any better.
Not quite. Microsoft took IBM's OS/2 1.2 and re-released it as "Microsoft OS/2". That was the only version that was officially by Microsoft alone. IBM went on to create IBM OS/2 1.3 and successive versions (2.0, 3.0, 4.0, and of course the upcoming versions).
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Today, I had a term paper to print, and the fucking thing did not work. It happened about a month ago, and I thought I'd fixed it by flipping switches on those stupid tabbed drivers. Yeah, Right! Apparently the stupid thing forgot what I'd done. Do you think I had time to fool with that junk today? It took hours to figure it out through that "intuitive" control pannel. So what happened, registry explosion? I don't know and I don't care.
One more thing, there should never have been a problem! My printer and my scanner are both from Cannon. You would think they would not bomb themselves. You would also think that a machine with no software added to it would continue to work as it always had. Nope, not windows.
Something else that I'd almost forgotten about was Windows installation. It all came flooding back like a bad dream last week when I bought a nice little thinkpad. It already had a "clean" copy of windows 95 on it. It works, but I found myself missing all of the tools that come gratis with any decent linux distro. God, all of the EULA's and what not! The painful incompatibilites, the stupid file naming scheemes, the painful "disket factory" that only alows you to make one flawed copy of the distribution disks, it was awful. It's so much easier to install Linux.
Sure, there are some hardware humps to get over, but once you've got something that works you can do it a million times without pain. 3C509B is a great NIC. Most NE2000 are OK, but you have to watch out for their dos based configuration routines. They don't all work together. Also, I've had trouble with the install of RH 6.1 and 6.2, they skipped network stuff. RH 6.0 worked perfect. Debian 2.2 works good but takes a little getting used to.
Wasn't there a registry hack to make an image file's icon a thumbnail in windows95/98/ME?
I can remember using it at some stage, but I've reinstalled Windows a *cough* few times since then and never turned it on again.
----- One piece short of Legoland
"There's only one UI that has any real R&D and UI testing dollars behind it, and it dowesn't have a footprint or K as an icon."
Or a Start Menu. Boggles my mind. Window's UI is hardly useable for daily work. Nasty fonts, horrible prints, inconsistent dialogs and menus, not to mention installation and maintainance of the system.
I meant only one UI in that comparison that has R&D money behind it. I specifically call out apple later on as a company doing original work -- I wasn't trying to "rate" the UIs in any way.
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Whistler will be out for the IA32 AND IA64 and MS has a team working on making the IA32 version take advantage of AMD's sledgehammer CPU.
You're thinking of the Louis Armstrong song "What a Wonderful World", not the Sam Cooke "Wonderful World" that is used above.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
Well...quite frankly, Slashdot leans toward the free-software world because much of the press world likes to lean toward Microsoft. It's refreshing to have someone take a non (even anti-) Microsoft view. That you've decided to attack a bastion of doubleplusungoodthink, well, disgusts me.
I had to watch Microsoft slowly take over through under-the-table deals, OEM armtwisting, etc. and watch publication houses whoring the latest Microsoft wares despite the fact that Microsoft was far from the leader in whatever category...give us our corner of the net and let us attempt the same. We might fail, but give us our chance. Microsoft had theirs.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I agree. I have a computer running FreeBSD. This is because in a few weeks I will have a DSL line and I want a web server on it. I'm having some unix guru friends of mine lock down the system, because I only have a vague idea of security. I can manage Apache just fine though :)
I'm not foolish enough to put a Windows box out to handle these things and I know just enough unix to keep myself from blowing the machine up once it's installed properly.
hmm, I'm not so sure about that. Win9x has a 32 bit kernel there, (C:\windows\system\kernel32.dll)Anyway- it's still a 32 bit kludge, single user, and I bet you'll still be able to get around the 'password' by pushing [ESC].
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Well, it isnt THAT terrible.
Gnome (and KDE to some extent) dont require you to run a particular window manager. Enlightenment and WindowMaker are a fair bit different than Windows' Explorer. Windows still doesn't look as if it'll support multiple desktops/pages. Gnome uses more of an atomic menu model than windows - you can have many 'start' buttons in panels if you want them. And panels can be of different types. With applets you can use different task management tools. By the way, I'm concentrating on gnome only because that's what I use, and havn't got experience with KDE - so I appologize for lack of an impression on it. Linux GUI is NOT a total rip of microsoft, and it's an insult to the good ideas of people working to help us out to call those ideas rip offs.
Of course, the hallmark of the modern Microsoft interface is the "Start" menu, which wasn't in either MacOS or OS/2 2.x, and is based more on the Next pop-up menu or the CDE taskbar.
(The Apple menu was similar, only that Apple intended it only for "desk accesories", where MS used their menu as a central place to launch all programs, and built the installer support to use it that way.)
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
i love linux as much as the rest of you, but gnome and kde both annoy the hell out of me with their not-so-uniform window sizes, windows where the text/buttons doesn't quite fit, etc, etc...for those of us who are running it at 800x600, it really looks shitty
now that Plex86 runs Windows apps, does anyone have a copy of Microsoft Bob? That way when you get tired of doing work and accomplising things, you have a cadre of animated assistants to make you feel superior...
Under X, when the filename is right there in front of you, it's just a highlight and middleclick away. (I love the X clipboard.) It's nearly as easy as just clicking an icon and you don't give up the power of the command line.
Generally, though, I agree that there is room for both interfaces. I happen to much prefer the command line for file management stuff, but other things definitely lend themselves to graphics. The most important thing is making both options available.
Remote Desktop!
Excellent! That should make it easier for crackers than going through the trouble of installing BO or Netbus...
These days I feel I am the only one who uses WindowMaker. I've been repeatedly disappointed with GNOME (but I think that may have something to do with my Linux install since I never hear repeats of my problems). I've been meaning to try KDE again since I haven't used it in almost two years, but whatever I try (FVWM and friends, Afterstep, Enlightenment) or mean to try (KDE 2, IceWM, Plan 9), I always fall back on WindowMaker.
The download is small, it doesn't have three miles of dependencies, execution and loading speeds are very fast, and it doesn't eat eighty megs of RAM.
WindowMaker can run programs from GNOME, KDE and more, if you have some weird stuff to run. I'm not saying WindowMaker is perfect, but it was so simple and intuitive to me and so easy to setup that it stuck with me.
This is one of the things I like about the UNIX world. WindowMaker isn't what "everybody" wants, but it exists anyway, and I think this is the way to go in general, rather than attempting a homogenized environment that tries to suit everyone's needs.
troll
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
You're smoking crack.
I had a PIII-700 w/ 256M of memory at work, and while I'm not a Windows-lover, I have to honestly say that I never had any of that type of trouble with any application. You might want to double-check to make sure that your system is working at optimal functionality, because that's certainly not normal Windows behaviour.
--
heh, I know the street name, but I rarely remember how to get there.
Good luck!
bm :)-~
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
The Windows (as in, Win32) customization scene has been around for a long time.
There are many programs out there that allow you to change their interface, sometimes only in how they look (WinAmp), but other times in how they act (K-Jofol).
Within the past few years, there have been a number of "shells" that have come out that allow you to ditch explorer (the start menu / taskbar / desktop combination) and use your own interface, like an X-Windows window manager.
Microsoft is trying to have the best of both worlds - a standardized user interface, with the ability to change it all. Personally, I don't think it's gonna work very well, but that may be just because I used to be on the Litestep development team.
Obligatory links:
Skinz.org
DeskMod
Litestep.net
desktopian.org
And those link to many more...
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
5. you still MUST use the command line at least once to setup the default install or ot lauch a useful service
And the bash command line is bad how? It's just another way to get things done. You try expressing a grep piped into sed piped into ... with a GUI. Plus, bash is infinitely better than Windows's command interpreter.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Who is this clown who imagines that I might even care about his depreciating comments about MS Whistler.
you are so ignorant, it's laughable. the ui ripoffs have been happening for fiteen frickin years.
No shit, genius -- so tell me did you actually read what I said or just feel self-important enough to contribute this "insight".
I never claimed MS was creating UIs from whole cloth, only that MS has done a hell of a lot more advancement and refinement of UIs than KDE or Gnome has. Apple and Palm and MS have all borrowed from each other, but just as importantly they've all ACTUALLY CREATED NEW THINGS, too! That's called progress -- are we using EXACTLY THE SAME UI that PARC developed all those years ago? No -- because people are actually allowed to develop new concepts to build on old ones. You don't have to reinvent the wheel to be a contributor to progress.
All KDE and Gnome have done is copy the wheel, while the actual developers (at Apple, MS, and Palm) are criticized for spending money without producing a better product?
mmmm...just a sec...X was developed at MIT at the same time as all three!
mmmmm...just a sec, X isn't a UI! you are so ignorant it's laughable.
Call me when you've read more than the nickle version of computer interface history and we might have an intelligent discussion.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
> got flatter
;-)
You mean much more like OS/2. I saw Windows ME running for the first time on Saturday and thought instantly hm another pixel off the shadows making it much more like OS/2. CDE under Solaris did a similar thing when we moved from Solaris 2.5.1 to Solaris 2.6
why a window manager matters? I don't really care about the window manager, or how it "looks". I don't really know many non-geeks who do. The most important thing is the apps, and consistentcy. That's all that really matters. Personally I use ICEwm, because it never changes, and I have customised it so it is quick for the tasks I need. I've done the same with windows. The only time I reboot is if I need another app, not because of the window manager.
This feature would be wonderful! (I'm a gnome user, and hate it when my taskbar gets full of netscapes and I have to guess which one to click on...) I don't know exactly how Whistler impliments it (or what the KDE discussionants thought) but I'd guess that when you click that taskbar selection it gives you a list -- wide enough you can read the actual page titles (window titles) of the entries so that you can select the one you want. This means I can unambigously get the right choice in two clicks instead of having to try randomly to get the right choice averaging n/2 clicks (where n is the number of netscape windows open). This is an advantage for n>2 when the number of taskbar entries is sufficiently large that no significant portion of the page titles is displayed. I think a lot of UI design can be reduced to the following: (1) make sure there is an easy strategy to get the right result (2) design the UI to minimize the number of steps to carry out that strategy. Here is an example of Microsoft doing a good thing and carrying out (2).
I doubt it's nearly as black and white as that... though I bet you certainly could point out the major driving force behind many things MS releases - "Bob" had to be a marketing decision while TweakUI was released from the geek trenches.
At my company as lead developer I make most of the decisions regarding new features, while marketing usually just 'fine tunes' a little... shrug. Of course our marketing isn't nearly as institutionalized as MS's is I'm sure...
My new catch phrase is: "I NEED A NEW CATCH PHRASE, BABY!"
To say that KDE/Gnome has acheived what it has not because of millions of dollars of research (like MS's Windows has) is an extremely stupid and short sighted statements.
KDE/GNOME has, for the VAST majority of it's interface, simply copied what Microsoft has done. It's REALLY easy to copy an interface and say hey, we did it without all the research. Gee...
Nearly every element of the common window managers available for Linux are nearly identical to Windows - by design no less, yet you some how come to the conclusion that KDE/Gnome got there all by itself.
Typical Linux zealots. Microsoft could cure cancer (heh) and you would refuse to acknowledge it because of your biases.
Oh, the review sucked too. I can't tell you how many times I have gotten lost in the non-standard myriad of windows that most WM's use these days for Linux. A novice user would be screwed.
I can even tell you exactly where they got it- read "Tog On Interface". Microsoft has! Bruce Tognazzini was developing this technique _decades_ ago, just the way you describe it...
It's nice that Microsoft care so much about using Apple usability testing. You'd think it would help them more than it seems to.
The main problem with Windows Explorer is that it has a tons of infrastructure, but Microsoft has made very little use of them.
So, here are millions of desktops carrying around god-knows-what memory bloat, and reduced stability unti IE5.0-SP1, and the best Microsoft can show for it in the default UI is a pie chart showing you your drive space in My Computer, and nasty Disney adverts on the desktop in IE4.
There are gobs of applicaitons for which 'desktop integration' would be great, but nobody takes advantage of it because nobody sees the light on the issue. Maybe Whistler will show the way, but I think once the 'integrated' OSS GUIs start to get more mature, you will see much more development there. (Because people can add do-dads easily, post them to Freshmeat, and find them in the next version of RedHat.)
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
The user is someone off the street, heavily pre-interviewed to fit various target demographics of experience or workstyles.
I don't know what exactly they are doing, but I would expect that their target demographic is office workers who currently use windows (poorly). This will exclude virtually everyone slashdot or open source cares about (experenced programmers and unix users) AND the demographic Mac went after (people who do not currently use a computer).
There is a very good reason that Mac still beats windows for inexperenced computer users.. Mac was interested in inexperenced people liking the Mac.. Microsoft is interested in bosses forcing their people to use windows. I should say that I really don't like Macs or Windows. I like unix, but I accept the fact that unix is a system of traditions where the first person to write a cool enough program to get all the sysadmins to install it sets the standard. (If your a sysadmin you should really like the idea of software by sysadmins for sysadmins)
Anyway, "user friendly" is almost totally realitive to your choice of users. Microsoft made an intelegent choice based on marketing, Mac made a noble but economically stupid choice, Gnome and KDE probable don't really understand that their is a choice (like most X based GUI's before them).
Personally, I'm not interested in a user interface being easy to use for office workers, grandparents, or even myself. I'm want to see people do the creative ivorey tower side of user interface research, i.e. stuff that has never been done before. Hint: if it has pull down menus or middle of the screan dialog boxes then it dose not qualify. (Personally, I think any "academic" who is doing user interface resarch and still talking about pull down menus or dialog boxes is a fraud) I don't care that such sustems would be hard to use since they would be intersting and show us possible new future directions. Plan9 made a reasonable attempt at such research.. and it was inspiring.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
and stock price has WHAT to do with this?
Also nevermind that you, yes you, can have that on a Win95/98 box with a cute little registry hack.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
there was no rampant flaming, advantages and disadvantages of all three were pointed out, there was no cussing, and a clear winner (which had better be the OS favored by the reader) was not declared.
what was the point? btw, for fun, you should have thrown in MacOS X review in. supposedly every is bitching about the eye candy going stale eventually, but some reviewers are starting to say it isn't eye candy, it just attracts your attention to what's relevant. hm...
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Ad (1) You can use file utility together with some easy config to make very easy and effective scripts like 'exec', 'open', 'view' or whatever that will open file with appropriate application for the given type. Wonder no one did so far...
And you have no problems with name of files. With tab-completion as a standard feature of bash, you never really type the name or ls anymore. :)
Ad (2) even in GUI you can use keyboard and shortcuts. If you will learn to use them, then even the selection of files will go in instant.
Its all only about what you get used to. With the difference that pointing device has kind of limited capabilities compared to keyboard. So in case you will use only mouse, you will be always loser.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Woo-hoo! Let's translate this final verdict into clearspeak. "MS Win-duh is nice because they've spent megabucks on UI design, while Gnome/KDE are nice although they didn't. And they should all steal even more from MacOS."
I hate to say it, but this article belongs to the from-the-bulls-ass department. The reviewer has no clue about user interfaces, and no background in CS whatsoever. Can we please get an ignorance filter for Slashdot?
To clarify this before people start to flame me: user interfaces need to be logical. This is a danged FACT! People can learn to use anything, as long as it's systematic. The Linux/Unix core is systematic. Gnome/KDE is not. Windows is a mess, but it's the monopoly so who cares. MacOS is logical, but it's disregarded as a toy. This reviewer doesn't even know what the word "logical" means!
The reviewer should read some of the stuff from Bruce Tognazzini.
--Bud
Well, here's the rub. Users very rarely have any choice whatsoever about using a Microsoft product. The user is forced or coerced into using Microsoft software. Whenever Microsoft could succeed in ensuring that they are the only alternative availible, they have done so. Whenever they could use illegal business techniques and marketing muscle to succeed, they have done so (MS-DOS vs. DR-DOS). Whenever they have been forced to rely upon innovation and technical prowess to succeed, they have met with mixed results, at best (WinCE vs. PalmOS).
It just goes to show you that no matter how much experience you have, you simply can't predict or estimate usability. You need usability labs. Eazel has set the stage in free software for this, and I think you'll see companies like HelixCode and RedHat follow suite.
Jason.
All Microsoft UI R&D is done at One Infinite Loop in Cupertino California
really, is that why Apple now uses ALT-TAB to switch between apps?
UI is not GUI.
And there are no "virgins" in UI development -- they've all ripped off from each other liberally. I never claimed otherwise, only that KDE and Gnome have given back little in terms of advancements...
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Can we buy a clue here? For all the sniping people do on how "unoriginal" MS/Windows is, as near as I can tell the entire KDE and Gnome approach is to just copy MS. So of course they don't have to spend money to get the same results.
Considering that KDE 1.0 debuted just before Windows 98, and offering a fully HTML oriented desktop, it is innovative.
And look at Sawfish WM, which uses a LISP based scripting language to customize and automate the WM to a very hight degree.
But enough about Windows. I do not like MacOS because it has no command prompt, which I feel is as necessary as a floppy drive (sorry, iMac users). MS Windows seems to be moving away from any sort of real utility in the command line, IMO, at least if Win ME is any indication. This isn't innovation, it is following the crutch that Apple started off with, though Apple has had a little longer to work something out, though don't expect to get anything out of their error messages.
On a funny note, you have all heard the joke about airlines and OSs? Anyway here it goes.
MacOS is a that airline with comfortable seats, good food, good looking flight attendents, etc. However, whenever you ask a question, you always get the same response: "You don't need to know that."
With Windows, the airplane is sleek. YOu can get under the hood and modify and customize it to suit your needs. Everything looks professional, but as soon as the plane takes off, it explodes.
Windows NT is the same but it takes out everything within 40 miles.
Now we come to Linux. You arive at the ticket counter and are given a large carry on bag which you open to discover your airline seat and a manual. After boarding the airline, you follow the instructions on the manual to successfully install your seat. The air line gets you there, and you tell all your friends about it. They reply, "You had to do WHAT to your seat???"
----------
I only use Windows for the programs. And only for work.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Whistler is going to utilize Intel hardware. Anyone else see this as sort of suprising considering AMD's current lead in the desktop market. Intel's P4 might actually be good by the time Whister comes out though
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Maybe on install of the OS you can pick "Beginner, moderate, Advanced". Once you feel confortable with the OS in beginner mode you can then install the "moderate" version.
Microsoft will soon be selling Windows Whistler Personal, Windows Whistler Professional, Windows Whistler Server, and Windows Whistler Advanced Server. (The marketing department reserves the right to search and replace "Whistler" with something else.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
This article notes many features present in Windows Whistler (such as an advanced taskbar, start menu, and file-manager integration) that both Linux GUIs lack.
Whie I still prefer KDE and Konqueror, I can understand that many of these features can be useful to many users. I think that comparisons like this can only help the Linux GUIs as a whole: Once they realize what they need, they can refocus their coding!
Free software is about freedom, including the freedom to express one's opinion. Opinion articles like these will help everyone, and, as ESR predicts, make the Free/OpenSource software products stunningly better than the proprietary ones.
|/usr/games/fortune
Not quite. Microsoft took IBM's OS/2 1.2 and re-released it as "Microsoft OS/2".
I thought it was completely co-developed up until the BIG split between MS & IBM, is my history wrong?
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Look, when will you guys figure out I'm NOT SAYING that MS invented everything on the GUI, only that they have done a million times more work on UIs than KDE or Gnome have.
And, it's worth noting that it used to be called "Microsoft OS/2", so it's debatable who's user lab the task bar even came out of...
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I sometimes wonder what MS is thinking when they make interface changes. Most people have a very hard time navigating around in Windows as it is... changing things only makes it more difficult for the user. I am talking about Joe User here, not the ones that are in-the-know and understand that you can turn half the new stuff off. KDE and Gnome have been progressing very well, and I know I will probably hear flak from the fact that KDE and Gnome make interface changes themselves. KDE and Gnome are developed by the same people who use it. No, not everyone who uses them are developers, but any one of us COULD be a developer. We can make changes and submit them. Whistler is being developed by a group of paid developers to design what they think is going to be best for the user. Also, take into consideration that most users of KDE or Gnome are quite a bit more computer savvy than your average Windows user. They can more easily interpret the information that is presented to them. They understand the concepts of drag and drop, right click, double click.... even middle click! I tend to find much of the interface of Whistler to be very appealing, minus that new start... thing. If the interface really does prove to be more intuitive, there is nothing that says that KDE or Gnome cannot copy it. At least, not until somebody at MS gets the bright idea to patent it... hehe
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
Well, post #3 said "Stick with a winner. Stick with Linux." It was only proper that the evidence be shown which proves Linux to be anything but a winner. Unless by "winner," you mean "incredible money-loser".
"it took the average user three seconds longer to find program X with GNOME than with KDE."
I guess you already found program X when you're using Gnome or KDE...
/*
KDE and Gnome has great userfaces as well, but haven't brought something completly new and cool up that we
haven't seen before
Has windows?
*/
Precisely...I wish I could find the neat little interview I saw in Byte before Win95 was rolled out...it had interviews with several developers. It was hilariously funny because one of the developers basically explained what interface they stole particular ideas from (the titlebar and toolkit was designed to be somewhat NeXTish, the desktop Mac'ish...etc.) A hilariously funny read and a good, honest look at how Microsoft "innovates."
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I've run (older versions of) KDE and Gnome. They were nice (KDE considerably more stable at that time). I'm glad that they're being developed. I'm glad that there is a choice. I don't use either one. Most of the time I'm punching commands in through some *term window because I just don't have time to futz around with menus and junk.
--
JADBP
Speaking of NIC's: When my NIC stopped working in Windows, I went to "System Properties", and it told me that it was working fine. After wasting about 4 hours fiddling with things (with every minor change requiring a reboot), I finally found that switching to a different IRQ made it work again.
Obviously you've only ever used 1 version of Windows. In Windows 3.11, you had to set the NIC in one place. In Windows 95 it was in another. NT 4.0 - different. Windows 2000 - different again. Just setting an IP address is the worst.
I've got Microsoft and Linux certifications, and I've used both about equally. And I can unequivocally say that they are both very inconsistent when it comes to configuring anything. There is no consistent management/configuration program in Linux. (But at least I can use ifconfig to do it manually, and can find the man page quickly.) And Windows keeps moving configuration programs around on me - really just confusing me, because all the different versions look pretty much the same.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I've promised myself an 80 Gig HD for Xmas. Am thinking to install Be then because *everyone* I know who has used it *loves* it. I don't really have the headroom to be dualbooting now (but I squeak by installing/uninstalling depending on my tasks). You make a good point that BeOS should have been included in the compare/contrast article.
The virtual desktop feature has been available for NT4 for quite a while as part of the NT4 Option pack. I'm using it right now. Whilst it only allows two screens, as opposed to four with Linux, it works very well with no noticable slow down.
In 2. you argue that command line is faster because it is easier to select patterns. But this wrongfully assumes that there always IS a pattern when you want to select a bunch of files.
What if you want to delete a bunch of files you downloaded yesterday. It's graphics, tarballs, packages, etc. There is no obvious pattern, and most people would just hold down ctrl and select all the files with a GUI.
This is not that simple with command line interfaces. Sure, "rm" takes multiple arguments, but what if you aren't really sure which images to delete. Wouldn't a thumbnail make your day?
You might want to look for some obscure mapped drive or lingering network connection (NT likes to remember old ones, for some reason). Having a fast machine only makes those idle waits more apparent, because the "real" work gets done faster.
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
Use menudrake with 7.2
Apparently not as a financial instrument.
Which suits me fine, I've always been more interested in Linux as something that made my computer more useful.
You should check out efm Here. while it's not complete yet, it does exactly what you are talking about, you can use it's typebuffer to select files in the file manager window or launch apps like you would from a terminal, very cool stuff.
of an earlier post of yours....
I seriously don't like the idea that they took common GUI instead of "rich" ones.
By comparing 3 similar GUIs (each having the same look'n feel), they just restrict their expectation of a GUI.
Maybe, if they had tested RiscOS4, BeOS or MacOS against Windows, they'd have found some others PROS/CONS as they don't interact the same way.
BTW, It could also be dangerous as mixing heterogeneous GUI features might lead to a feature-rich but totally illogical interface... Which actually hapened to Windows95 that was a cross between MacOS, Risc Os and XWindow and that they decided to personalize focussing by adding that browser features in it.
Finally, I hate the 3 latter for many reasons among which "focus-theft" is well-placed : while you are typing something, outlook throws an alarm windows that "absorbs" any keyboard event until you focus back to your work.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Yeah, it's not Free as in Speech, but the API's are very clean and elegant, it's got great SMP support and the thing really flys for me. The UI is also very intuitive and easy to use/learn.
Unfortunately there are all of about three applications for it, so no one uses it. (Catch 22: More apps <--> More users)
Why must I double click on a folder to open it when there are five mouse buttons and a wheel on my mouse (not to mention 4-6 modifier keys on my keyboard)? What's even funnier is that the middle button doesn't even do anything on the icons in GMC (I know that mouse-1 selects and opens in KDE, but it really shouldn't be like that).
Here is how tasks should be assigned to mice buttons in file managers.
1. select
2. open
3. move
and if you have more...
4. back
5. forward
wheel: scroll
My second biggest gripe is toolbars.
Most toolbars in gnome can't be folded up or removed, or the buttons on it can't be added or subtracted. I think that each app should use the Panel functionality as the toolbar, because, lo and behold, it's the same concept! This would allow users to make as many panels as they want and put whatever buttons on them that they desire. For example, I'd have absolutely no toolbars.
Got friends?
P 2 P___H U M O R
great comedy company.
Also, I wonder why they don't compare the GUI based admin tools, ... Possibly because everyone already knows that there is no comparison.
/export/home/l33tj03 -s /usr/local/bin/bash -u 666 l33tj03.. done.
You are SO right. CLI-based admin tools beat GUI ones hands down every time.
useradd -d
click start, click some other thing, click some other thing, click users, click new user, fill in a bunch of forms, click ok, click confirm, wait... done
Thanks for bein' so l33t, j03!
Leading the partnership for a Slashdot-Free Slashdot, Son of Dog
Its funny that everyone is finally getting around to stealing this feature from Be. Although I personally couldn't stand it and wish I could turn it off in Be.
Since when do "winner" and "make money" have anything to do with each other? Is this a contest to see who can make the most cash, or to see who can make the better OS?
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Linux will be around. So will gnome and kde. Redhat, VA Linux, et al may not be. They seem to make very little difference in the grand schemem of things. But still, it makes little sense to compare the features of Microsofts product to those of linux's currently shipping equivalents, namely because Whistler is so far away from release that any feature or weakness can easily be changed in time for release...
Past that... I for one am happy that the stock market has become a sane environment once again. There were too many ideas that were getting too many millions in financing thanks to aspirations to be the next amazon, yahoo, or ebay. Maybe now people will start concentrating on those little things like "profit", "revenue" and "margins". But that's a conversation for another day.
I was using HPUX w/ a variety of popup menus in 1988, and it had been around for awhile then. Before win 1.0 I believe. You are talking about systems here, and you are just plain wrong -- windowing GUI systems are all basically the same when you walk up to them.
:)
This may be the crux of our disagreement, then -- I don't believe "popup menus" make a UI and more than "paint on canvas" makes a painting (or "characters in text file" make source code).
This seems to be my main issue with KDE/Gnome, as well -- they think that making prettier menus, or floating shapes or customizable buttons is "improving the UI". This stuff has nothing whatsoever to do with UI, it's all cosmetics.
UI is putting buttons where you expect them to be, ensuring that the user is rarely surprised by output (by making sure they understand the ramifications of their input).
The web, for example, is a very "ugly" place, from an aesthetic standpoint -- but it has a FANTASTICALLY successful UI. All you do is click on any blue underlined text and you get taken to the link location! That's pretty much the whole thing, beyond that its cosmetics -- but its that simplicity, clarity, and predictability that have made it so successful.
Sure, we read it, but how hard is it to make popup, cascading menus in early X w/ twm? Or to pull down menus from the early Macs' menu bar? I've always throught the start button was dumb. If KDE and Gnome had no foot or K, I guess I'd use an icon to launch a menu system or use popups. I don't really care.
Again, it has NOTHING to do with the buttons or the menus -- making a menu is a technical issue that's easy to solve. The HARD part is figuring out where to put the menu, how it reacts to the user, how it behaves when no attention is being paid, how it displays contents when it is activated, etc.
I'll give you an example: When you have your mouse over a menu, if you go a little bit off the side of the menu, should the menu close? Should it open the menu that is next to the current one (in other words, open the menu under the current location of the mouse and close the one that is where the mouse WAS), or should it keep the old menu open (and if so, how long, and how far should the mouse be allowed to stray?).
I personally find the very unforgiving menus in most X windowing systems to be very hard to use because they will close a menu without hesitation should you stray by even a pixel. It's a very mathematical (and computer-programmer logical) way of behaving, but its simply not a good UI, because it doesn't accept that people do not have perfectly steady hands, or that they need to move the cursor in order to read the menu option. You simply MUST be more forgiving than that to have a useful UI, but I just don't think it's ever occurred to a Unix programmer that users might not be able to drill down through a 7-layer deep cascading menu without being off by a pixel. My grandmother doesn't play enough Quake to be that precise with the mouse!
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
it's my understanding that eazel's nautilus will have previews of a number of file types.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I must speak up here and say if you want a version of Linux more like Windows try something like Mandrake. Although I find SuSE to fit my needs everyone is different. Just because something isn't exactly like Windows does not mean it does not work. Why are people so against taking an extra 5 mins to figure out how something works.
There are companies who have useability labs which are made available to partner organisations, I am sure that Lotus or IBM would be quite happy to entertain the prospect of hosting a session for Linux testing. Probably best coming from RedHat as they have already been through the formal certification process with Lotus.
ALT brings up the menus while arrows navigate them, CTRL+TAB navigates tabs at the top of dialog boxes, TAB moves the cursor to different buttons, Space presses a button or widget (checkbox/radio button), ALT+Letter selects a control with an underline in its name, ALT+TAB switches applications, ALT+ESC navigates open applications in a sequential order, Logo+D toggles minimizing of every application to see the desktop, ALT+Space brings up the system menu, ALT+F4 closes an application, F3 initiates the Find command (or Logo+F), ALT+Arrow initiates the "Back" or "Forward" command in explorer windows, Backspace navigates up one folder in the tree of My Computer or Explorer, F2 usually renames something, and F4 brings down the "Drives" in a dialog box or My Computer
In Internet Explorer, F11 makes it full screen, F6 lets you type in the "Address" bar, F4 pulls down the "Address" bar, ALT+Arrows works here too, and so on.
Hope this helps. Personally, I never use the mouse except in games or when navigating web pages.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
I have to disagree. I have never used Gnome much, but I have used KDE and Windows enough to see that KDE has made progress on their own, without the help of Windows.
:)
They did start out by borrowing the most intelligent UI elements from various existing GUIs (devices on the desktop ala MacOS desktop, heirarchical program selection ala Windows Start menu). But they added many of their own UI improvements.
KDE had total web browser integration back in 1.0. The file manager WAS the web browser. Wanna download that file to a particular directory? Just drag the hyperlink into the appropriate folder. I have heard that IE is finally doing this sort of thing, but KDE certainly preceded it.
The previously mentioned thumbnail previews of image files was in KDE before any Microsoft product.
Drag-and-drop is implemented intelligently in KDE. Drag something to a folder or to the desktop, and you are presented with a Move/Copy/Link option EVERY TIME. That's so beautiful I could cry. I hate guessing when Windows wants to move, copy, or make a shortcut to a file.
Right click on a file and you are presented with an "open with" option BY DEFAULT. You can get this in Windows, but only with an annoying shift-right click.
Click on a program or document in the taskbar to minimize/restore it. Yep, KDE had it before Windows.
KDiskNavigator showed up around 1.1 or 1.2. This offered a Start Menu-style approach to browsing your filesystem. Very quick way to find something if you dislike the command line. Windows doesn't have this.
KDE can use smart window placement to keep your windows from getting too cluttered on your screen. As far as I know, Windows doesn't have this.
Add to this all the traditional advantages of using any X-Windows window manager (more configurability, multiple desktops) and you can see that KDE hasn't been playing catch-up to Microsoft for a long time.
When my girlfriend first saw KDE 1.2, she was so excited, she wanted to know how she could get it onto her Windows laptop.
I think we're all aware of the fact that money does not measure QUALITY.
I do not use Win2K at all -- I use Linux at work and BeOS at home. But my coworker uses Win2K and he experiences the loss of the mouse and the freezing of the computer on a daily basis.
It seems that for every anecdotal story about Windows being stable there is another about it being unstable, and vice versa. What can we conclude from this?
Win2K is really no different from any other Windows: on some circumstances it is inexplicably stable, and on others it is inexplicably unstable. From this, I conclude that Windows is unreliable.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
--rant on-- Four with linux? What distribution or window manager is called linux? AFAIK KDE has build-in support for 8 virtual desktops and gnome has unlimited amount. I'm using icewm which also gives that many you want. --rant off--
Is there similar option for W98 or W2K? I would love to have even two virtual desktops with my W98 box. Yeah, I have tried those third party tries but I'm not satisfied with them - perhaps MS could have done one thing right. I think I just need to keep searching...
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_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
In short, you're used to Windows and you want something to work like it. Maybe you should use Windows. All of the things you mention stem from Linux's strengths. For example, you have a choice of Gnome and or KDE desktops, applications and various window managers. You have to choose which to use and configure them, how could you expect this to be as easy as Windows where you have 1 configuration and you can't really change it anyway?
As for third party tools - the ones I use under Linux as good or better than their windows equivalents. The difference is that when a Linux application crashes it doesn't screw the whole system like in windows 98.
If you just want to use Gnome and the default RH7 install you don't have to configure anything on the command line(don't know about NICs). I don't see how can complain that it's difficult to do neat stuff with Linux when you can't do it under windows anyway.
I agree with most of your comment, but I don't quite agree with you about the "horribly slow file managers". You can't have tried Konqueror, or your KDE2 installation must have been broken in some way, because Konqueror is at pretty cool and fast filemanager imnsho. The Control Panel in KDE2 is a bit confusing and overwhelming, but it's not that bad. Furthermore, I don't use the Control Panel directly, I just use the startmenu and launch the "Configuration panel" (I don't know what else to call it) from there.
A thing still lacking is stability (not the kernel, but in the desktop environment), but KDE2 has just been released and I expect that it will be better when KDE 2.01 is soon released and maybe it is just because my install is broken, but it is (at the moment) a standard Mandrake 7.2 install, so it ought to be more stable than what I've experienced until now.
Another thing is an easier way to install new applications. it shouldn't be necesary to go use the CLI ever to install any app, but it often is. Furthermore the applications automatically (or ask about it) put an icon in the startmenu and elsewhere. Helixcode's Red Carpet looks pretty cool.
Greetings Joergen
The idiocy of ranking UIs is that - what users are we talking about? You, a "person who owns multiple computers"? Those aren't exactly very impressive qualifications. Basically, you're ranking the UIs on your personal reaction to them. Fine - but what makes you think this applies to anyone else?
Window's UI is hardly useable for daily work
That's absurd. Tens of millions of people use Windows every day, at work and at home. You may not like it, but it's the truth.
Sorry for the rant. I just find it aggravating to hear Mac OS people say that no OS has ever approached the UI of the original Mac OS. As I've tried to show, that idea is nonsensical.
Oh, I almost forgot, in the Accessibility Control Panel, you can turn on Mousekeys which lets you move the mouse cursor with the numeric keypad. There's pretty much no room for error this way.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
NICs, vague tools, and configuration files... Ok let's make a point. If you go to the Army no one tells you that rifles will shoot automatically to where you point, right? If you have some initiate experience on Linux and take intervals of a year to "restudy" it, then wait that the rifle will shoot the same way as before. Linux is not a "AI automatic rifle system". IT IS NOT. Wanna go shoot? Pick the damn RTFM and dig on it as if you are doing 50Km marches a day.
If you did that, then you would know how to launch your damn driver in 2-5 minutes without rebooting the machine and kick KDE into Hell. And a simple wget would be enough to grab the packages you needed. And you wouldn't be whinning about "desktop experience" but kicking the graphic desktop up to the extremes without that "Start" button crap...
How can you compare a 16\32 bit, single user, kinda multitasking OS, with a 32 bit, multi-user, multitasking OS? Thats like comparing apples and oranges. If you want an 'even' comparision, compare KDE\GNOME with Win2k.
Oh, ya, they were just comparing the gui (also known as 'frosting'), not the real functionality of the blasted thing.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Well that explains Microsoft BOB at least. It was just as usable as it was useless.
--
Best new white rapper since Pimp Daddy Welfare... Pimp-T!
In one paragraph he names the grouping of instances of the same application confusing for beginners, and in the next he wants to introduce more than one virtual desktops into Windows :-)
Put Win 3.x up against OS/2 1.x's Presentation Manager... they're the same UI
Put Win 95 up against OS/2 2.0... very similar.
I think that the Win interface is less stolen from the Mac than it is from the OS/2 interface (which has some Mac influences in it, granted)
Lets all get our wives/brothers/mothers/non-techie friends/etc... to use KDE, GNOME, Windomaker, Enlightment, etc... and ask them for feedback.
Anyone out there with a psychology background that would lend an opinion?
No sig for the moment.
Why? Because I usually open 20 or 30 applications at once and need space to organize them. KDE is nice, but not as extensible. Furthermore, the desktops do not form a contiguous space. With GNOME I can organize my work and accomplish much more without trying to guiss what all those icons on my taskbar represent...
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Linux and BSD or BSOD... Your choice.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Everyone knows that Microsoft has put millions into userface research (or whatever it's called). They make great UIs everyone likes and can understand. You are probably biased if you think otherwise.
KDE and Gnome has great userfaces as well, but haven't brought something completly new and cool up that we haven't seen before, simply because they haven't put millions into research...
I have to wonder why this article was written in the first place... perhaps as an excuse for the author to write about this new and totally exciting new Whistler-thing...
The thing which makes me laugh the most is your inane attempt at trying to connect the success/failure of Linux with some stocks in a currently _very_ bear market.
Man ! That article was so politically correct I can't believe it...
;)
Whatever happened to the good critical slaughtering of products the author doesn't like ?
Sheesh...
Actually, maybe. Microsoft already owns rights to online depictions of Whistler's Mother for their Encarta encyclopedia, so they could partake of this whimsy if it so struck them. However, Microsoft has always been slow to acknowledge codenames in their software once it gets to final distribution stage.
-- Anne Marie
You know, I have never heard of IT managers that don't use software because of some company's stock valuation. The stock market is not representative of how much linux is being adopted since it's free. At best, it reflect how companies are struggling to make a profit in the Linux support buisness.
Why would anybody think that moving the mouse to the task bar and clicking a 'start' button is better then right clicking anywhere on the screen to get the menu?
It's just poor UI design.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not quite..this guy was a real pro. The main point of the post is that like MS or not they take interfaces and usability seriously (even if they still mess up).
I only post twice a year, who needs a sig?
Do you actually use your desktop more than applications?
One of the things I greatly appreciated in KDE 1.x was the integration of 'readline-style' command history in some widgets ( the address text field of the file manager, as well as in the mini-command utility ). You could use TAB for file completion and cursor keys to recall previous conmmand/addresses.
Sadly, it seems gone now.
Ciao
----
FB
You will be able to run Whistler "headless", i.e. without any ui at all, without even a video card; you'll just do configs via the serial port of a cosole over the network (telnet? ssh? something wierd of their own design?).
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
KDE2 has a theme with short title bars as well!
The virtual desktop feature has been available for NT4 for quite a while as part of the NT4 Option pack. I'm using it right now. Whilst it only allows two screens, as opposed to four with Linux, it works very well with no noticable slow down.
Virtual desktops have been commonplace on X11 desktops since before either Linux or NT even existed. It's just taken NT a long time to catch up...
He completely skips over the atrocious design of the control-center, where a configuration box can disappear but not be saved.
What's the environment in question. Without knowing what the user is ment to be doing with it and in what kind of ogranisation then comparisons are rather useless anyway.
This "comparison" is a joke. The reviewer, clearly an experienced linux user, tries to guess what might be confusing to newer users. A true _usability_ comparison would focus on how easy a person can _use_ the interface. He completely skips over the atrocious design of the control-center, where a configuration box can disappear but not be saved. He doesn't talk at all about real-world use, like "it took the average user three seconds longer to find program X with GNOME than with KDE." How does Whistler's navigation of menu levels compare to GNOME or KDE? Are either of them as slick as the original Mac? Do whistler taskbar items respond to screen-edge clicks yet? How easy is it to do X Y Z with each file manager? It's a superficial "first-impression" piece, not a usability comparison.
This is something I find really ironic, since it has traditionally been MacOS that was GUI-only, and Windows always had some sort of command-line. Now, as of Windows ME and MacOS X, Windows will rely totally on a GUI and MacOS will have a far superior command-line thanks to its UNIX heritage.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
"All three" aren't learning from each other -- both are learning from Windows. There's only one UI that has any real R&D and UI testing dollars behind it, and it dowesn't have a footprint or K as an icon."
First I should mention that while the menu feature is a typical Windows borrowing, many others are not. Second don't forget to mention some "testing dollars" to Xerox, Apple and even some less known Hewlett-Packard that helped the creation of the Win9x interface. And to end, don't forget a less reffered X that had the menu system quite before Windows had it... If you don't believe than go grab any old Unix from the beginning of the 90's.
And this guy gets 5? UberTroll
I said I felt like I was the only one using, but the way the Slashdot discussions are going these days, it seems "everybody" is using either KDE or GNOME. Personally, I don't get what's so cool about either of them (keeping in mind I haven't tried KDE in two years).
GNOME seems to suffer from the Mozilla syndrome: no matter what version you get, it acts like a beta. I've noticed GNOME improving over the past few releases, but that's all I can say for it.
KDE was kinda cool when I tried it way back. KDE two years ago seemed more solid and cohesive than GNOME is today, but KDE didn't seem to stick with me, either. I reformatted that Linux install and never chose to reinstall KDE, which is the primary reason why I haven't tried it since.
Sung to the tune of (What a) Wonderful world:
(What a) Microsoft World
------------------------
Don't know much about my CPU,
Don't know what a DIMM's supposed to do,
Don't know what a hard disk is for,
Don't know how to overclock my core;
But I do know that Microsoft rules,
'cuz that's what they taught us all in school,
Oh, What a Microsoft world it must be.
Don't know why my screen is always blue,
Don't know what these damn exceptions do,
Don't know why my modem runs so slow,
What it's sending out I just don't know;
But I do know what the salesman said,
Once I save enough to finally upgrade,
What a wonderful world it will be.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I ran both the KDE and the GNOME widgets simultaneously in WindowMaker to confuse myself (and my friends).
Winners don't go bankrupt.
I agree, that CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM helps everyone. Since NO gui is perfect (they all have their cool little features and quirks) discussing what makes a good GUI great, helps to design more user-friendly UI's. I don't have time to invest X hours learning a specific GUI, and most people also don't have that kind of spare time -- I have better things to do, like writing game code :)
... )
:) This is the one strength that Linux has, TONS of developers working world-wide. Of course Linux's "main fault" is lack of consistent vision, and a lot of redundant work. i.e. Browse sourceforge, and ask yourself do we REALLY NEED Yet-Another-Text-Editor?
:)
> This article notes many features present in Windows Whistler (such as an advanced taskbar,
BeOS has had this feature for while. It is very slick. Let's say you open up 10 copies of your web browser (NetPositive) you DON'T see 10 huge buttons spread across the task bar (Deskbar, or the Twitcher), only one. All instances of the same program are listed vertical. IMHO, this is making more efficient use of limited screen real estate.
Which brings me to my next point:
The stupid application title bars DON'T extend across the WHOLE top, in BeOS. All that space between the application name, and the Minimize, Maximize, and Close buttons are simply WASTED in most GUIs. Not so, in BeOS. Even more cooler (usefull!) in BeOS, is that you can SHIFT-DRAG any title bar (Be calls this the window tab) along the top of the window! (The direct link to "A Look at the BeOS Windows" doesn't work for some reason) Makes it extremely easy to switch among visible apps.
Seems like everyone, Be, etc, includes virtual desktops/workspaces by default, EXCEPT Microsoft!
And who can forget Be is FREE!
... now only if Be would open source BeOS, and make it true multi-user, it would last "forever" and have a chance of becoming a popular OS.
Well, I've probably come off as a BeOS zealot. Far from it, I LIKE and use: Win2K, BeOS, Linux, and BSD. Use the respective tool for the proper job, since when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, something Linux may fall into, if it's not carefull.
Cheers
Microsoft is one of the first (if not THE first) to do serious usability laboratory testing for microcomputer software. This is separate from unit testing, regression testing, stress testing and focus testing.
The labs are set up much as focus group rooms, or if you haven't seen those, tv cops' interrogation chambers. A simple but attractive office or homey room with a computer and a few knick-nacks, overseen by a VERY wired booth and a large one-way mirror wall.
The user is someone off the street, heavily pre-interviewed to fit various target demographics of experience or workstyles.
The instructions handed may go all the way from an unopened box in the chair (install and explore this), to a preconfigured setup and a few written instructions as if from a boss.
The people in the control booth record everything said by the user, and done with the computer. The controller can converse with the user through an intercom, and even move the mouse pointer or type remotely, but generally lets the user drive the show.
The user is asked to think out loud as much as possible, to say their goals as they conceive of them, and to say their reactions to what they see. "Okay, I didn't mean to do that. I think Undo would be here, and, yep, okay, undone. Oh, but that erased this other thing too, which I wasn't expecting."
Now, bring this to Open Source or Free Software. The lab doesn't need to be so fancy, but the REAL needs of REAL users must be REALLY observed and dissected and made into REAL usability gains.
If usability angst testimonies are filtered between the neophyte to the guru, how can the guru comprehend what the neophyte needs? Guesswork makes for crap software.
Conversely, in 1990 or so, Microsoft's LAN Manager group dismissed the feedback from Microsoft's own employees, as "not the typical user." A shame, because at the time, there were very few 30,000+ node LANs in the world. They could have clearly benefitted from the feedback of such users.
[
Yes, there's a preference option and a hotkey for audio preview. Actually, there are preferences and hotkeys for just about everything.
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Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
Actually the latest releases of Sawfish, the default GNOME 1.2 WM, groups windows by programs - accessible by clicking on the desktop with the center mouse button. A matter of time before GNOME's tasklist applet features the same idea I guess...
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
If you use Debian, then the menu (of whatever window manager you choose) contains exactly the programs you chose to have installed.
Again speaking as a Debian user, my system automatically installs security fixes by itself (it dials up once a day to check for them).
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
KDE 2.0 file browser has image preview thumbnails--it's one of those things you discover when you use it for more than say, 10 minutes for a superficial comparision. But I digress...
-- Eric
hasn't msoft stock been fairly low lately?
with the microsoft takeover of corel, combined with the impending sale of corels' linux efforts, shouldn't corel stock be rebounding?
how many tech stocks that have nothing to do with linux have cratered in the last 9 months?
youe post definately takes a rather skewed view at tech stocks and the market in general.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Actually something like Konqueror does is pretty cool. It can kontain (yes, pun intended), a term in a frame inside Konqueror, and it will (optionally) cd to whatever directory you browse to with the GUI. Pretty nifty.
The Consumer Pack (CP) is supposed to be the next version of OS/2 from IBM. After January, you won't be able to purchase OS/2 Warp 4 from IBM directly. You'll still be able to buy copies from eBay or other retailers, at least until stock runs out. However, it would not be unheard of for IBM to change their mind at the last minute and continue to offer it for sale, at least in a limited degree.
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
For all the sniping people do on how "unoriginal" MS/Windows is, as near as I can tell the entire KDE and Gnome approach is to just copy MS.
Including copying things which can make Windows a pain, e.g. expecting (even demanding) end user configuration of things like email.
The thing is, those projects which are useful get used by programmers. Those programmers then do maintenence on the sw they use not as official maintainers but as guys who want to fix that damn bug -- and the effect is every bit as good.
That's how I've made most of my contributions -- not as part of some commitment to a project but as an effort to fix that damn bug (on my own behalf or on behalf of my company).
That's another point to consider. Sure, the defaults may be good for the user for the first while they're working at the computer. But they aren't going to stay clueless forever, and eventually they'll want to start customizing things, or performing more advanced operations. In my experience, they slowly start to find that the GUI they found so wonderful when they were new users slowly becomes almost unusable because it prevents them from doing things the way they want.
Unfortunately, few ever bother to try a different OS. Kind of a shame, as I think most Windows users I know would love BeOS. I don't use it myself, but it seems to strike a good balance.
-RickHunter
Suck my long hairy white cock.
to fit your needs and preferences. to sort just right click on the opened list and choose sort by name if you want an aalphabetical ordering. Got a custome layout you prefer then just drag the items into the order you prefer. Dont want something in the list just right click and choose delete. Presto that stupid readme thingee is gone. Only wnat One Adobe entry in the Start Menu then drag the contents of 2 of them to the third. Place then in the order you want then right click the unneeded entries and select delete and their outa there. The Start Menu is just a collection of shortcuts its easy to bend them to fit your needs.
As to why they show up there in the first place its more than likely that the user just accepted the default options of location during install.
I would rather have everything chunked in, giving me control over what stays and what I remove.
It's not about the money, it's about the quality of the product.
Linux isn't going bankrupt.
He compares a W95 successor and two W95 clones and finds them similar. Big deal.
Still the best GUI is OS/2's Workplace Shell, supported by a filesystem with extended attributes. Its OO nature makes it consistent and apparently easily extensible, as I have yet to see amazing tools like DragText or XFolder/XWorkplace for other GUIs.
With Linux, I need bash to have similar control.
Censorship on Slashdot
... and I'm not just talking about the mail program, either.
What the author previewing is a development version of whistler -- one that will be available to everyone in 2001 or later. In contrast, the versions of GNOME and KDE he's using are most likely the current, stable ones (1.2 and whatever the KDE stable is (2.0?) ). So currently, Whistler is ahead in the few points the reviewer touches on.
However:
By 2001, Nautilus will be out and have the preview feature the reviewer wanted, plus many others.
By 2001, HelixCode's Red Carpet will provide even easier updates than the current packagers.
By 2001, GNOME and KDE both will have radically improved interfaces.
I don't remember any other specific complaints the reviewer had, but this is clear: With whistler, we'll see that one interface in 2001 and then no improvements until the next version -- maybe '03 or '04. OTOH, GNOME and KDE both are progressing at a rapid rate. What they already have in devel will surely be out way before whistler, and the improvements will be a steady trickle of bugfixes and enhancements, instead of seasonal service packs and enhancements only every two years. So while Whistler may be ahead for now in what was reviewed, but this will be radically different by the time whistler is actually released.
--
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
"Oh, I'm using Gnome, whose logo is a foot, so I bet I should click on the foot to find my programs." This is a design flaw that will hopefully fixed in future versions, should Gnome/KDE want to cater to those less-advanced Linux users.
If these users are using linux, they are more advanced than some of the windows users I've seen, this should not be a big concern.
Gnome and KDE, on the other hand, have managed to put together very useable interfaces without millions of dollars behind them.
This has to drive Gates crazy, unless he holds the paten on the GUI. shiver
Winner...........Gnome
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
IBM realeased Aurora, the last version of OS/2. OS/2 Warp 4 support will be out next january. You can buy additional support or buy a new version sold by a new company under a new name (eComStation). IBM won't release any new version of OS/2.
So anyone who uses Linux on their main
box is a zealot?
Hey GUYS!!! The weather channel are a bunch of zealots! Go get'em.
A statement like yours belies a total lack of maturity. There are a great deal of analogies I could make but the all boil down to this.... History has shown time and time again that pre-judging large groups of people is not mature.
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RobK
Myddrin
It's MS's fusion of NT and Win 9x/ME. The kernel is NT.
And that's my $0.32 (adjusted for inflation).
>pay its employees to do work, most of you
>open source freaks (except the ones that
>still get allowance from mommy) would be
>out of a job.
>"Won't programmers starve?"
>I could answer that nobody is forced to be
>a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get
>any money for standing on the street and making
>faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to
>spend our lives standing on the street making faces,
>and starving. We do something else.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
I'm pretty sure that stocks price (or value) has nothing to do with the persistance of an operating system.
All those stocks you listed where pretty worthless before the companies existed. Hell, Apple stock price (according to an analysis by cringelyhere) at one time had very little to do with the value of the company.
Stock price isn't a good indication of how successfully a company's strategy. Stock price is a good indication of ignorance.
Tech stocks are the best example of the idiot margin. (where this is probably some idiot who will pay more money for your stock than you.)
Yes, but look at the stellar heights that
they were at. There was no sane reason that VA should have been trading at 900%+ it's IPO price. Even the most pro-MS(and pro-Linux) analysts have conceded that this is a normal stock adjustment for a stock that was majorly overvalued.
In other words, wait another year and the prices will bounce back up.
It is also highly unlikely that it's only linux stocks that have dropped that much. In a bear market like this, the price drops will fall along a bell curve. You might want to go to your library and check out a few books on how the stock market works. It's not nearly as simple as you seem to think.
While currently all of Microsoft's competitors are doing poorly (look at Apple stock!), that clearly is an indication that wall street sees Microsoft as the "safer" bet. As opposed to two years ago when they were seen as the _only_ safe bet in the tech industry. The anti-trust trial, Linux, the resurgance of Apple, the newly found balls at Sun and Oracle all have made the entire tech industry seem like less of a sure bet. Currently there is no clear "winner", even though it is very obvious that for the first time in 25 years, MS is on the defensive. Linux of course would seem the least safe bet because no body has tried to make money this way before. Given the untested business plan (from wall street's perspective) and the bearish market, I'm suprised Linux stocks aren't trading lower!
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RobK
Myddrin
It is interesting that Mac OS X was not being looked at. Whistler was designed around the modern "simple aproach" and the big flat icon look like Mac OS X. It seems KDE and Gnome were not after this look. Instead, it looks as if they are going for adding more features on the front-end requiring an more experienced user, while Whistler/OS X is creating a simpler interface for any user. I wonder why KDE/Gnome is being compared to Whistler at all, other than the needed attention by the open source community.
You have go that right. Many people do not understand the pros and cons of every system. I, personally do not either, but I am experiencing different type of systems all the time (dos/win, nt, macos, beos, gnome, kde, sun, etc.). Depending on the type of work (or play) you do, a different type of system is necessary for you to be productive. I completely agree...
Ciao 1337...
G.
_____________________________________________
Working is the curse of the drinking class...
Seems to me that they would be better off taking the desktop in a new direction instead of falling MS's lead. The one thing that made me nearly puke when first using Linux/Redhat/etc was the attempt to make it look like Win95. Sorry, but if your going to copy someone's interface either do it right or don't do it at all. As for highly paid developers, MS is also employing large research groups whose job is to find out how users use their computers, what makes it a pain, and what they want. Too many KDE/Gnome types are so much more wrapped up in themselves they don't see that. How can you honestly expect to have users want to use your system when the number one constant is "the users of windows aren't nearly as smart as us" or "most of the regular users don't understand x, y, and z". Sorry, you don't know better, if you did all these holier-than-thou attitudes would be focusing on how to make it work for the user instead of telling the user he is too stupid to know how he/she wants it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I didn't say that the command line is faster period, but rather that it's faster in some instances, while the GUI is faster in others. I do use CTRL-Click a lot, and I use column sorting a lot as well--in your case here it would be easy to sort by date and select yesterday's files. I'm just saying that having both options and the ability to use either at any time would be ideal.
I've only read a few paragraphs yet, and already I feel the biasedness towards KDE/Gnome. Example: you're comparing the Windows Start menu alike menu's of KDE/Gnome, as if they were original, with the new Start menu in Whistler and complain about the extra level you have to go to to start your programs. And then you say:
'This seems more user friendly, although a "recently used programs" option would be quite nice, and is a good idea on Microsoft's part, if not a completely original one.'
Recently used program not completely original, OK. But what about the CLONE of Windows that is KDE? As if KDE came up with the Start menu itself.
I believe the ideal is a combination of command line and GUI. Some things are a lot quicker to achieve graphically, other quites awkward or impossible, but very easily done on a command line.
XMLTerm is XTerm meet icons and hyperlinks.
If you are looking for novelty in UI design, I think this is new. I don't know how easy or bloated it is, but it's different though, at the same time, it's known.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Gnome and KDE, on the other hand, have managed to put together very useable interfaces without millions of dollars behind them. All three interfaces need work to become as user friendly as possible, and all three can learn from each other.
Can we buy a clue here? For all the sniping people do on how "unoriginal" MS/Windows is, as near as I can tell the entire KDE and Gnome approach is to just copy MS. So of course they don't have to spend money to get the same results.
"All three" aren't learning from each other -- both are learning from Windows. There's only one UI that has any real R&D and UI testing dollars behind it, and it dowesn't have a footprint or K as an icon.
When Win95 came out, all people did was complain about how stupid the start button is, now we read comparisons that say "well, KDE and Gnome both have start buttons, so they're just as good as Windows, I don't know where MS is wasting all that money."
So we can bitch and moan about how imperfect and stupid MS interfaces are, but quite frankly there are only two companies that can claim any moral high ground for actually advancing the UI outside of ripping off MS: Apple and Palm. They are the only companies I see actually doing NEW things as opposed to "me-too"...
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
As an advanced user I'd rank them:
KDE/Gnome
Max OS X
BeOS
Other recent Mac OS's
Win 95 w/ Internet
Win 95/98/NT
DOS/Win 3.x
I see average semi computer literate sit down and use all of the above on a frequent basis so I'd say they are all fairly usable.
KDE is the better UI for recent converts to Linux I think but Gnome is better for die hard geeks (not that it's non-appropiate to non-geeks, it's just more flexible and less Win/Mac like). I update my versions of each nightly and both are very good and improving quickly. Part of KDE/Gnome's strength comes from their Linux-basis which lets me mingle GUI and CLI as needed so I can apply whatever is most effective to solve the given job. OS X is a large improvement in this area but still isn't as good at it as Linux/KDE/Gnome. Windows trails heavily in this area as do older MacOS and even BeOS. KDE/Gnome really need some standard on how icons and menus are laid out by default. Going between distributions can be annoying and confussing even to advanced users. Helix Gnome solves this problem nicely. KDE needs something similar.
OS X and BeOS both have their strong points but lack the growth rates and flexibilty of KDE/Gnome and the resource Windows has backing it. Despite this I like using both on occassion.
MacOS in general is pretty good though I'd argue with anyone that says it is the crown of GUI's. Somethings about it are just confussing by nature and it's over-simplification gets in the way of serious work.
Win95 w/ Internet Explorer had some nifty features and was really easy to setup desktop features. However it was fairly unstable and when IE or Windows crashed it tended to bring thw whole thing down.
Other versions of Windows before and after Win95/IE have some serious problems with usability and being plastered in so many logos and over-simplified crap that they are a serious problem to anyone trying to do real work. The fact that some buttons/options still don't have online help, but often offer it anyway, still irks me.
DOS/Win 3.x were fairly good. In some ways they were better than current versions of Windows. I think the only real failure was the trouble of setting up Internet access. This of course is due to the lack of the Internet when they were designed.
Now I'm not saying which is best for total clueless newbies but for anyone who has been working on any of the above for a while, already has it set up, and just wants to get their work done this is how I'd order things.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
There is no clear winner or loser. Each interface has it's [sic] advantages and disadvantages.
This surprised me, though I've never been disappointed by Jeff Field before. Newsforge is still, as its mission states, a forum for "open-source news" -- just look at the banner atop the front page, where "GNU/Linux" is prominently displayed where "Linux" would suffice for most. For such a site to publish an article that doesn't universally deride Microsoft or celebrate OSS offerings is a pleasant change from the earlier years.
It looks like linux-centric media are finally growing up. I'm glad, because it would be a shame for the movement's mouthpieces to stumble just when the movement itself is gaining such momentum.
-- Anne Marie
You can get the "command line here" power toy from the msft website- works in '95 & NT that I know of, probably 98 & 2k too. It puts a cmd-line in yr right-click options in Explorer. It's not exactly what you ask for, but pretty close.
-- 'intellectual property' is oxymoronic
How do you figure the open source movement that is responsible for Linux is going bankrupt? Sure, maybe a reseller or two are having a rough time, but they have nothing to do with the OS other than putting it in a flashy box.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
G%^ damn it poeple!! Quit bitching and use something else instead of Windows. I am just sick and tired of reading the same comments over and over again about how Windows blows. People, you have a choice. Use Linux. Use OS2. Use BeOs. Whatever, but for crying out loud, QUIT BITCHING. Geezus.
--
I agree with your point entirely. It is possible that a lot of the reason behind this is that it is easier to make an interface prettier and a lot harder to make it more powerful. Simple focus group testing will tell you that people want something bigger of a different font here and there or a start menu twice the size of your screen. It's easy to make those aesthetic changes like flat windows. There's no REAL new thinking involved. Designing a new way to say more with less is THE struggle with HCI and the reason it exists. It's just not easy to figure out how to do and takes FAR more effort and making the start menu blue. Anyway, I agree with you completely, just wanted to try to explain why it may be like that. Justin Dubs
Oh, and now I am suppose to believe that the fonts in Netscape on Linux is better that the fonts in IE running on Windows?
--
"I sometimes wonder what MS is thinking when they make interface changes. Most people have a very hard time navigating around in Windows as it is... changing things only makes it more difficult for the user."
Its Marketting. I have designed plenty of apps that I believe to have the perfect interface only to be told to change it for the newest version. It kills me to do so because I write a lot of psychologically based apps where even the BG color is there for a certain reason (ie., if I am writting a testing application, I usually use blue backgrounds as this puts people at much more rest and eases such things as computer anxiety...well slightly anyways). What is my boss thinking when we release a new application? He's thinking it looks exactly the same. What do the people who buy it think? It looks exactly the same. If it looks exactly the same, WHAT CHANGES ARE THERE??? As such, I end up having to break some of my user interfaces, change things around to make it look newer and cooler so potential upgraders will realize its new.
Human Interface Standards have nothing to do with interface changes. Its getting dumb ass people that don't realize that they could simpy read the specs to figure out whats wrong. Hell, in M$'s case, maybe they need to draw away from the fact that it really is the same old windows with no real changes that will help the user. Hell, I'm still using Win95 on this machine (err...its actually Dual Boot to 2000, but I only use 2000 to test stuff) as 95 is the least intrusive of the 95/98/SE/ME series when it comes to using my music apps. Only dumbasses upgrade just because its there.
clif
In any case, it seems unneccesary to compare something to both Gnome and KDE. After all, the objective of both projects is to provide an environment that works almost exactly like Windows. (Not saying that's bad, of course; my problems with Windows stem mostly from internals and design philosophy, not from UI.) Whatever one does, the other does too. (Generally. I don't know the details, since I haven't used either for very much.)
What would be more interesting would be to compare it to something with a significantly different interface--for instance, I've started using XFce, which works rather differently than Windows. OS X might also be another good choice for a comparison of interfaces. These others may not have the market share of Windows-workalikes, but they'd make for far more interesting reading.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
You're not too bright, are you? If you had actually read my post, you might have noticed that I was praising the MS GUI.
No, you can't fuck me, that's your mother's job.
-- Will program for bandwidth
KDE and GNOME suck just as bad as Microsoft's latest crapwear. If you are going to copy a UI, why not copy a good one?
How we know is more important than what we know.
well well. i am no GUI designer or specialist. i personally don't prefer kde or gnome/enlightenment - kde looks by far too toy-like for my taste and enlightenment.. well, i just don't like it. although, i think win2k desktop isn't bad with some modifications, it still doesn't cut for me. but i think it still feels by far more professional than kde or gnome/enlightenment. (note: i have not tested kde2, maybe i have to someday, but i don't like the way kde wastes my desktop with some useless panels and menu systems - and i definately don't like "icons" on my desktop. they create clutter).
then again, i prefer on my desktop two things. 1) no clutter. 2) it has to simple and easy to use. now, there's one windowmanager for *nixes that does this for me: the olvwm. it might be old, but for me, it's the best. (and easy to configure, and small - uses very little system resources.. etc).
ound the message used repetitively over and over still nothing grows silen
consider the following: Most people only need a basic phone with basic functionality (dial, redial, memory). Some people though, need more sophisticated phones (conference, transfer, speaker, voicemail, page, mute...etc). So what is microsoft doing?
I'm not sure if this is good or bad. The hardcore programmer (for windows that is) is going to be using the same OS as the grandma that just wants to check e-mail. Sure grandma could buy one of those e-mail appliances but who knows how long those will last.
Operating systems should not be one size fits all. Therefor, microsoft should consider making an OS that is less "dumb". I don't want cute buttons that make me click 30 times before something happens. I want to be able to do things fast and effecient.
Why don't the sell OS's like phones. Some with lots of functionality and some with little.
Maybe on install of the OS you can pick "Beginner, moderate, Advanced". Once you feel confortable with the OS in beginner mode you can then install the "moderate" version.
I don't know. Cute and fancy isn't the way I like my OS (I have to use Windows because of the work I do). Long live DOS... I'm outta hair like a bald guy
MacOS X's aqua UI isn't just eye candy (though it's pretty good at that too!). The OS X dock is the most functionaly UI piece i've seen in a long long time. How come gnome and kde aren't ripping this off right now? At the moment they both look like (albeit better) windows95.
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/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
I believe the ideal is a combination of command line and GUI. Some things are a lot quicker to achieve graphically, other quites awkward or impossible, but very easily done on a command line. Two examples:
1. Opening a document. If you're in the proper directory in Windows Explorer, you see the document icon right there, in front of you. Just double-click on it, and it opens. You don't have to know which application opens it, what the exact name of that app is, etc. On a command line, even after a DIR or LS, you still have to type the name of the viewer app (and potentially its full path) as well as the name of the document, even though it's RIGHT THERE, in front of you, you want to point to it and grab it. While some die-hard CLS users would argue that the command line approach is easier anyway, many people wouldn't concur.
2. Selecting a bunch of files. Here the GUI can get quite awkward or useless. If the selection criterion is simple enough, it might be workable: select all files starting with project1*, for example. Sort by name, select the relevant files. But if the selection pattern is more complex, that might not work. You really have the urge to type something like SELECT *YAHOO* in the address bar, that would be so much easier.
> It is much harder to remember where something is than remember the name.
A lot of people would disagree with this statement, myself included. I can remember how to get to someone's house, but I rarely remember the street name. Many people think think very graphically, in terms of objects and actions. I often forget the syntax difference between regedit and regedt32, or regsvr32 or other such abominations (which abound especially in unix). It's a blessing to have the command history in the RUN command under the Start menu. On Linux after a few months of disuse, I have to run back to the manual for a lot of commands, even though I know exactly what I'm trying to achieve.
Shouldn't the 'shortcuts' be located on the right side of the screen by default? They're always unnecessarily getting covered up by other crap on the left. I think MacOS is the only one that's hip to that beef.
No, I'm not visually impaired. The fact you'll need to "redesign" (ha!) software for Whistler doesn't mean jack, because I'm commenting on its usability features, as was the article.
This reasoning that proves Whistler is totally new reminds me of advertisements that say "New Ford Escort limited edition: now with lame stickers on the sides". [Ford Escort was the first thing that came to mind and there's no connection between the quote and the Real World]
I mean, for God's sake, it's not even "New Pepsi: now in a different aluminum can!".
Flavio
Rather than re-create Windows or Palm/Graffiti or Excel, it'd be better if people'd look at the UI problems tabula rasa.
LyX, www.lyx.org does this and it's far more promising than MS Word or a knock-off of same.
Rather than re-create Excel, it'd be far nicer to look at Lotus's now abandoned Improv and do a true 3D spreadsheet which forces one to intelligently/elegantly structure one's data.
Rather than re-work Windows, why not look at a product which which was designed to improve upon it? HP's NewWave was the most intensively object-oriented UI (in execution, not API alas) for the desktop and was killed off by MS for their embarrassment over that.
PenPoint, from Go Corp. was also a very promising UI, with an elegant distinction between tools and data. Darned shame IBM didn't buy them out, or that they didn't choose to partner with IBM instead of HP. and to ultimately link with NeXT.
At least NeXTstep looks to be surviving twice over, once as a hybrid with Mac OS in Mac OS X and again in a purer form as GNUstep, www.gnustep.net
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I don't know what you guys are complaining about Gnome. My 5 year old (who doesn't yet know all his ABCs) feels at home with Gnome. Of course, I need to create a special setup for him, customized GDM to display his photo in login screen, removed password, removed the foot menu, added a few drawers with his favourite games. Now he can switch on the machine himself, login to his user id and start whichever game he wants.
I need not worry about him messing up the system since his user id has limited authorization. He often screws up when working on windows for running those windows based game cds, but mostly he likes working on Gnome.
This is the greatest advantage with Gnome (and Linux in general). You can set it up for a totally illiterate user who wants to do just a few things with the computer or give as much power to the power user if he wants.
You guys may say I don't pay attention to details, but I can't see a difference between this so called "new" Whistler and the current Windows 98 interface.
:)
Sure, icons and bars all over got whiter and everything appears flatter, but overall we're talking about exactly the same thing.
Talking usability-wise, I can't see any advantage in comparison to Windows 98, and quite frankly, I don't expect to see any. I think Windows is decent as it is and couldn't think of a way to execute things faster and better without a CLI. (please respect my views here
Am I the only one that thinks the clean Window Maker interface can't be beaten? Most argue about "the average user" finding it more complicated, but come on!, the average user gets dumber each day. Let's consider for a change that Whistler isn't really something new (at all) and that maybe it's very good already.
As for KDE/Gnome [I've got to comment on them, otherwise this would risk being offtopic], they're far from being Whistler. Linux's power doesn't come from nowhere and to channel such versatility is a very hard task. Anyway, I'm not sure I even want them to be like Whistler.
Flavio
As an advanced user I'd rank them:
KDE/Gnome
Max OS X
BeOS
Other recent Mac OS's
Win 95 w/ Internet
Win 95/98/NT
DOS/Win 3.x
As another advanced user I would rank those pretty much the same well except that KDE/Gnome would be nestled below Win9X/NT/2000. OS X PB is far more robust in terms of development environment and integration of graphical ways of doing things versus just pulling up Terminal.app. Think of the years of NeXT and OpenSTEP development that are still there, the Objective C API, and display postscript which is now dPDF(Aqua). Even the Linux/GNU community is trying to reimplement it as GNUSTEP. I've edited things with Terminal.app as text files in vi, then pulled up the graphical manager and all the settings were kept track of. Netinfo is also incredibly powerful and elegant. Besides anyone who wants to use a UI with cartoon icons anymore come on. We have all that power lets have the photorealistic icons, vector graphics, and anti-aliasing of fonts. The other UI's are a joke.. oh and I'd drop Win 3.1 from even qualifying for the list. I had to support a machine with that OS again after leaving it behind for so many years... it is just a terrible interface... and ugly, and I resisted moving from NT 3.51-->4.0 because I didn't like the 9X interface... gosh what was I thinking. The other thing one must remember is that GNOME and KDE run on X-windows. X-windows is a pile of junk. It's slow, non-standardized, and most of the software up until recently that was written for it is aesthetically unpleasing... look at OpenLook for example... uglorama, and Athena widgets. Also GNOME is great if you don't use Enlightenment.. if you use Enlightenment forget easy to use or pretty... exotic maybe, but everything is just designed to look good on a screen a mile wide, and that pager is the worst thing in the world. Helix GNOME and the GTK wm's are far better. BeOS I've never used, but every screenshot made me say hey that's cute, but ugly at the same time. I think the tab topped window titles were the make-break... they looked like roadsign exit denotations. The other thing was a total lack of major developer interest....and Gassee, but that's beside the point.
Just thought that a link to this would be appropriate right now while we speak of all those fancy GUI:s.
WEll, MS bloody developed the first versions of OS/2 together with IBM... No wonder they had very much the same interface...
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Well, not for the My Computer Idea - but take a look at the tasklist - it seems to indicate that there are 8 Internet Explorer Windows Running, but they only take one slot up! Great! Personally, when you have a lot of windows of the same task open (generally netscape, emacs, etc) - You don't want clutter. Lets steal this feature before MS even comes out with it!
Ok, thats my 5 cents. (which is about 2 Cents USD)
There is no clear winner or loser. Each interface has its advantages and disadvantages. Windows doesn't have a bad interface -- and it shouldn't, because Microsoft has put millions upon millions of dollars into making sure Whistler isn't the next "Bob." Gnome and KDE, on the other hand, have managed to put together very useable interfaces without millions of dollars behind them. All three interfaces need work to become as user friendly as possible, and all three can learn from each other.
What a worthless pile of mugwumping shit. It reads like a 15 year old's paper for English class. There rest of the article contains equally factual and substantiated information. Screenshot links are sprinkled liberally.
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Moderators: I've got tons of accounts, do your worst.
Then there's the whole Start/Foot/K menu. Why? I mean, don't get me wrong, menus are great, but there's just no intuitive way to configure any of these Start Menus. When I click Foot >> Programs >> Applications >> Calendar I have No idea What app I'm actually launching. What's the command line for that? It doesn't tell you! Then you can only partially customize the damn things. Can't remove the Settings submenu from start, can you now? Can't do a damn thing with it.
The only nice thing about the Windows Interface is that's what everyone uses so people pretty much know what to expect. The only thing Nice about the K Desktop environment is it looks almost exactly like Windows. (which, by the way, is ugly like a butt) and the only thing nice about Gnome is the panel app, which you can run without running Gnome.
I say get a Window manager you like, a Gnome panel or two, customize your own favorites menus and BLAM! A Userface made for you... the user. As for the Graphical admin tools... why? that requires me taking my hands off the keyboard so I can reach for the mouse and click around on somethings. Slow, inconvenient, great for people who really don't know what they're doing.
(1) Technical sounding language,
(2) Credibility by association, and
If something I said can be interpreted two ways, and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, I meant the other one.
Or a Start Menu. Boggles my mind. Window's UI is hardly useable for daily work. Nasty fonts, horrible prints, inconsistent dialogs and menus, not to mention installation and maintainance of the system.
Being a person who owns multiple computers (at home) and has several OS's (see below) I would put GUI's from best to worst in the following order (sorry if i leave your Your Favorite OS[TM]).
1. Mac OS 9
2. MacOS X PB
3. BeOS (I'm quite impressed with Be, but it looses points for difficulty of setting up OpenGL on "supported" video cards and for shipping with a Web Browser that isn't at least as standards compliant at Nescape 4.x)
Large Gap in useability
4. Windows ME/2000 (same basic UI)
5. KDE/Gnome (these loose points for the following 1. Setup 2. Lack of applications standards [choosing what is right for you is Okay, but after the choice is made, file mapping on import and export should be automatically, autolaunching on web clicks should choose your fav app to handle the service etc] 3. horribly slow file managers 4. their respective "control panels" tool and 5. you still MUST use the command line at least once to setup the default install or ot lauch a useful service) I have used Mandrake 7.x, RedHat 6.x and 7.0 (kept mandrake 7.1)
Burn Hollywood Burn
They've also been commonplace on PCs since before either Linux or NT even existed. And they've been available for Windows and Windows NT for almost all of their existance. What's your point? Oh and in repeated usability tests, they're always found to be too confusing to use except as an optional add-in.
So what prevents you from turning off the new start menu? Or displaying your files in explorer via a list? You realize that explorer is completely customizable via html correct? You can make any folder look like anything you want provided you have fair html knowledge
So far Nautilus is nothing more than a clone of the Windows ME/Windows 2000 shell.
This reviewer has obviously not used a mac. The recently used programs menu has long been available on macs, as has the windows95 interface.
Still waiting for something innovative from M$........
Slashdot Beta should die a painful death.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
See what I mean? And the dialogs for each Windows version are all different as well.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Mac was GUI for people who could afford a very expensive new computer with almost no RAM (128K with almost none left after OS load) and no hard drive. Windows was the GUI for "The Rest of Us". When the rest of us got better hardware, Windows got overlapping windows.
Well, I installed Red Hat 7.0 this weekend (after a year hiatus from Linux) and, I hate to say this but, I missed Windows! Perhaps I am just used to navigating Windows but I feel that some important gaps are left in the Linux "Desktop Experience:"
My NIC wasn't working. In Windows I'd go to the "System Properties," find a yellow question mark, and work on the driver. Under Linux I was lost. But I'm pretty sure I still have to work with vague 'mod' tools and configuration files. Same for the mouse. I can't remember the commands when I only need them once a year. This is nerve-wracking; and a great example of the importance of GUIs (recognition not recall).
Under Windows I get to start with a clean system and add tools I want. The start menu is relatively empty and ready for my bidding. Under Red Hat (and SUSE) I'm deluged with half-finished CD writers, and configuration tools. The start menu is filled with crap I've never heard of. Help, glub, glub.
In Windows, I go to a site like tucows or softseek, look at screenshots of little helper applications and install them separately. Again, Red Hat and SUSE filled my system with half-finished toys. Want KDE? Fine, use gnorpm and dig through weird menus of choices and find all sorts of little pesky individual packages. (In the end, I STILL can't load the KDE window manager.)
In Windows, I click on "Windows Update..." and get system patches for bugs, security holes, etc. I'm not aware of a simple method under Red Hat.
In short, a "Desktop Experience" to me means I don't read man pages and tinker with config files, then rc.d. I've read about all that, and tinkered with it. I'm glad it works. But I DON'T want to revel in it! While Unix systems get their power from scripting and small tools, the "Desktop Experience" is a different beast! I'm all for the Unix tools and use them religiously, but that's a different issue. (Linux the OS still works great!)
hmmmm...uh...let me think...oh yeah! MS ripped off apple!
oh..wait...let's see...Apple ripped off xerox!
mmmm...just a sec...X was developed at MIT at the same time as all three!
you are so ignorant, it's laughable. the ui ripoffs have been happening for fiteen frickin years.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
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go to hell, stop putting those crapy pics
When did ICQ#'s get up to 8 digits? I *am* old.
the Man in Black
ICQ# 4122986
El riesgo vive siempre!
"There is no clear winner or loser". I'd have to agree. The only benifits these days to running windows is that you can view quicktime and windows media player files under it (as well there are some other programs just for windows). Other than a few issues here and there, any UNIX running either kde or gnome could satisfy most corporate environments. Hmm it seems it should just boils down to price now. If you don't like the linux hype there is always FreeBSD.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Better still, look at Javelin Software's Javelin and Javelin Plus. Lotus Improv was an almost complete GUI clone of Javelin Plus. Unfortunatly, the parts that weren't identical weren't as well thought out.
Use a wide variety of useful applications, or
Play good games, or
Watch or edit video, or
Use any hardware that was made in the past two years, or
Use a good office suite.
As a programmer, I find that the applications useful to me (text editors, compilers, shell tools) are better suited to the Linux environment.
Linux has given me much less trouble on brand-new hardware than the various MS products.
As for games, well, there's no rule against dual booting.
This ends today's feeding of the trolls.
Gnome is pretty good from this perspective, you can customize much of its behavior and appearance. Windows on the other hand, behaves and looks in a specific way and there is very little the user can do to tweak it to his/her liking. The problem and tradeoff here is this... if you increase configurability, you usually decrease consistancy. The windows UI is made the way it is to be consistant on a whole. That little X button in the upper right corner always closes the window (unless the program crashes...). Consistancy is the biggest newbie problem. Although I would love to change the look and feel of my OS (and I do through 3rd party proggies), I don't think I would trust my parents with it...
Dijital
Diji
"I came, I saw, I WTF'd!"
... that Enlightenment is God.
Who needs more than a gkrellm and a left click menu anyway?
It seems with every version of windows things are getting "easier" abd the user is, by default, taken away from the complexities of file systems and hardware.
In the days of windows 95 and 98 this was great, a large majority of people had never used a computer before, and liked the idea of a start menu.
Today there arent many people arround that cant load up Word from the start menu. Will these people, the non slashdot reading majority of computer users, enjoy these "enhancements"? Most people I know have 6 or 7 icons on their desktops for there often run programs and games, and the rest languishes in the start menu. They are pefectly able to get them though. They can right click on C: in My coputer and if theres lots of purple then thats good - they have lots of space (or is it blue for free space - I forget)
The people that have never used a PC before are unlikely to find this any easier, as when they ask their next door neighbour, who has gotten used to windows 95/98, they will get a confusing reply.
With linux heading to the main stream geek OS, and WW: PE, heading even more for the newbie, many semi-savvy users will be looking for a comfortable middle, which will probaly mean spending a few hundered bucks on the next version up from PE, or sticking with 98/ME.
They wont be able to stay with ME for long though as new technologies will require upgrades, in the same way >2GB drives needed 95osr2.
What will happen then, is complete speculation. If Microsoft continue to dumb down their $80 version of windows, I can see a growing market in replacement shells for windows.
How long before the "intellegent" menus, as in winME, cant be turned off? Will the traditional start menu be going the way of program manager?
Once people get used to an idea its very hard to take them off it.
I'm really happy for Microsoft's really PRETTY interface, but what about an interface that lets you work more efficiently?
I want to see MORE data on the screen, not LESS... With the "new" start menu, not only do I have to click an extra time to get to anything, it also covers up 1/4 of the screen! The "explorer" now has nice big bars with spaces between them seperating your drives... Can't I see more than 8 drives on the screen at once? Or is that too confusing?
Anyways, thay's my $0.02 worth...
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
please show me the NT command line for displaying a list of open files, sorted by process name.
thanks!
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