An Alternative Look for KDE

An anonymous reader writes: "I'm a huge OS X/Gnome fan, but still highly respect the KDE project. I still try and keep up with it's developments and recently came across this posting on KDELook which proposed a totally new GUI design for KDE, which I think could be quite easily adopted in other environments as well. A rolling Slashdot discussion I think would help keep the open-source innovation going. Thoughts?" Update: 11/27 20:12 GMT by T : Amended to give credit where due, which in this case is to the anonymous submitter :)

Comments

Re:ARRRRGH

[ivan256]

That's not what I saw at all. This totally elimintated the traditional "windows-like" taskbar in favor of things that were like "cards" that could be mostly slid past the edge of the screen when not in use. Also, each of these "cards" could have embedded applets. It's nothing like the Windows GUI, or anything else for that matter.

If you ask me, the whole thing still takes up too many pixels. I'm still desktop-less since I can't bring myself to spend the screen space. What I need is something like these "screenshots," but that disappears completely unless you're holding down the 'Alt' key or something.

Made me think about Squeak

[IIEFreeMan]

It made me think about Squeak/Smalltalk except that in Squeak it is called flaps and when expanded they look like the standard kicker ie it takes all the width when the flap was attached to the bottom or top of the screen.

The card idea is great !

Re:Made me think about Squeak

[RevAaron]

Ah, I was thinking about that too, but wasn't planning on mentioning it.

I am kind of like on of those emacs freaks, but with Squeak. I use Squeak basically as my computing environment, using the Squeak web browser, email client, irc client and xterm/telnet client for the bulk of my computing activities.

I have my environment setup to use these flaps. You can toggle whether you want the flaps to expand on mouse over or on clicking the flap. I put my email client in a flap, having it nicely tucked away, but immediately accessible. When I'm doing real work (e.g. programming), I will put my IRC session in one as well. I have a number of other tools I put in flaps that do auto-hiding depending on what I'm doing.

So no, this KDE concept thing is nothing new to some of us. :)

This is nothing but great news

[PinkX]

I really hope that this project gets all the attention it deserves, and becomes the new 'de-facto' look for KDE.

I am not a big fan of desktop environments (I use AfterStep alone), but this idea shows a big improvement over the rather old and boring start-menu-taskbar model of win95/NT4/98/me/2k/xp, GNOME and current KDE.

It really shows innovation, and moving away from what is already stablished cannot be anything but a good thing.

Stunned In Awe

[MBCook]

Wow. What more is there to say? It's very clean and nice looking. I really wasn't expecting much, I mean how often do new ideas for how to make a desktop actually work? But this really looks like it would work well. Like I said, it's clean. It reminds me of aqua, but "less", which is a good thing. I've got to say that if this doesn't make it into KDE, I hope someone makes a new window manager that uses this idea, it looks handy. I've been useing WM lately because it uses less resources on my little system, and I've got to say that I really like it. If my system was more powerfull, with things the way they are today, I would probably stick with WM. But if my system were morepowerfull, I'd be willing to switch over to that system. I'm sorry that I don't quite know how to describe my reaction. It seems like a very intelligent evolution that would be very functional and doesn't clutter things up. I'd love to give it a try.

PS: As for comments like "Why is copying WinXP by rounding things considdered new?", it's not. The fact that the edges are rounded is NOT the point, that wouldn't be new. Why don't you try looking at the forest once in a while. That said, I think that rounded things look better than square boxes. The use of curves instead of straight lines seems natural now that graphics cards are better equipped to deal with it than they were back in Win 3.x days.

Re:Stunned In Awe

[sweetooth]

How is it more difficult for the user? The buttons are not external to the curve? They are inset a bit away from the curve and are clearly defined. The fact that the buttons are curved should have no effect on the users experience. If users have a hard time clicking, then those particular users may not be well suited to using computers.

The only thing that drives me nuts is when because of the pretty shapes the window borders become excessivly large as with Windows XP. I don't want my title bar to take up 100 pixels because it is some odd shape.

I think size and not shape is the issue to be concerned about. Too small and people might have a harder time clicking on it or reading information on it. Too big and it becomes a severe waste of space. Especially on smaller monitors.

CPU useage is a valid concern, however most modern desktop environments/window managers/display servers have code optimized to draw these types of widgets and often pass the dirty work on to the video card leaving the CPU to do other things. The average Joe with an $800 Gateway/Dell computer still has more processor power than they probaby need, and will not notice the fact that a few extra cycles are being used to draw curved window edges.

Quite frankly, excellent.

[EnVisiCrypt]

After the author's initial revisions, this is a pretty spectacular redesign.

I would really love to see something like this implemented for Linux.

While the core theory behind the design is *really* good, I would eliminate the extraneous application elements. The quicklaunch above the K menu should go, and the quicklaunch on the right should be used instead. The slideout on the right should be what the card application for "information center" launches from. The taskbar on the upper left should be open by default, hidden on the click of the arrow. I don't think the cards should be activated on mouseover, the behaviour should be:

If !ontop{
focus
hideothers
}
expand

All in all, the card concept is great, and this design would be a much needed ideological break from OS X and XP. I've heard some grumblings that it will "confuse windows lusers", and "we need to keep the old style for windows to linux converts!". Remember though, users don't need the operation of the interface to be immediately apparent, it need only be easily learned and consistent, which is a common failing of Linux applications/desktops. It would help to think of usability as "learnability" instead of idiot-proofing, a la Jakob Nielsen.

Looks like...

[bill_mcgonigle]

The MacOS 9 control strip, plus the MacOS 9 pop-up tabbed windows, plus the Mac OSX 10.0 dockings. But hey, Apple's abandoned all of these good ideas in favor of the vanilla dock, so it's great that somebody's using them.

This is excellent, but ...

[imr]

You can already do it in kde3.
The only difference between his layout and a customized kde3 is the look of his task bar (rounded edges and pixmaps).
Right now you can add more than one kicker, taskbar and kasbar on your desktop (right click on kicker -> add -> extension).
You can also choose where to display them (bottom, up, right and left side) and how (center, left or right) and their size (to the pixel) and the size of the icons.
My present layout is done in a way which respects most of his ideas since it came from my everyday needs.
( you could have many extension on top of each other for the double sized quick launch but it looks broken in kde3.1. Because they add this center, left and right thing?)