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How Configurable Should a Desktop User Interface be?
The Original Yama writes "In the world of user interface design there are two main schools of thought. The former maintains that the environment must be flexible and configurable enough to adjust to a user's needs. The latter takes the opposite perspective, arguing that many of today's user interfaces have become bloated and overloaded with features, and consequently have become difficult to maintain and use. KDE developer Mosfet shows how the KDE Project has managed to bridge the gap between the 'highly configurable' and 'less is more' camps."
It should be stripped down to only those features that I like, arranged in a manner that helps me work the way I want to. Nothing more, nothing less.
How that effects *you* is *your* problem.
(Please note that the above is not the opinion of managment and is a piece written by the author with his tounge planted a bit in his cheek as an illustrative example of the essential problem in a reductio absurdum sort of way and vaguely following somewhat unclear tenets of the Scoratic Method. It has come to our attention that the Socratic Method may be prohibited by law in Athens, so we advise our Athenian compatriots to don their helms of wisdom and avoid reading the above lest they fall into coruption and dissolution. Hail Athena! Sparta must die! Oh, sorry, got carried away a bit there.)
KFG
the latter generations of key punch machines.
True, you could set the drum with which columns to always punch, but just look at the price that we have paid for that little trade-off of convenience.
It's time we got back to basics.
Sam Nitzberg
Hi I'm **** and I'm a recovering theme. Originally I just wanted to make my desktop look cool, sometimes lean and mean styles like fluxbox with borderless transparent terminals and some spacey background images. Other times I'd try for an elegant desktop where I could have a panel, some sytstem monitors and icons without making the screen look cluttered.
That was fine, but there was always more to do. Redesign some buttons here, alter a gtk theme to match the gnome theme there. Pretty soon I was out of control.
My rock bottom came when I downloaded the CVS source for e17. I spent day and night with it. All I ever talked about was Evas and Imlib2. My girlfriend left, I was fired from my job, friends eventually stopped coming round.
Then I met this guy named Bill. He helped me install Windows 2000 on my laptop and showed me how it was pointless to change any of the appearence settings because they all looked the same anyway. Thanks to him and the friends I've made in here I've been able to stick to word processing and other stuff on my computer, one day at a time.
Thanks for asking me to share.
:wq
Why, in the old days all we had to do to change the interface was get out the soldering iron and reconfigure some bistable multivibrators around. Then just drill a few new holes in the panel, add some blinken lights, and Presto!
But can you get a drop in bolt on the kill switch that can only be removed with dynamite these days? Nooooooooooooo! Can't even get a bloody Molly Guard for the things. Any damned kid can just walk right up and reboot the thing over and over again to their sticky little heart's delight.
"Daddy, what are you working on?" Boot.
Arrrrgh!
It's unseemly. Kids don't know how good things used to be.
KFG
I wonder, when Linux takes 90% of PC OS market, whom will DOJ sue?
Probably Linus should consider moving back to Finland...
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
>Little to no "widgetry"
/bin/bash !
>One point of access to functionality.
>No more windows.
>More use of text.
>Seperation of "background" tasks from "foreground" tasks.
The next-gen GUI is