Slashdot Mirror
KDE & Gnome Usability Engineers Interviewed
Gentu writes "After the recent flamewar between the KDE and Gnome user camps, OSNews brings together the most influencial KDE and Gnome usability engineers to talk about how they will be able to overcome a number of obstacles in order to 'unify' KDE and Gnome in ways that could bring to the Unix desktop an easy to use, integrated and fully interoperated DE to better compete with the commercial alternatives. Waldo from SuSE and Havoc from Red Hat are taking part to the interview, and also Aaron, the head of KDE's usability."
There is no flamewar. There is no "war".
Users can use whatever they want, the two proejcts get along better than most to be honest.
THis whole fued thing has been overhyped by "news" sites since gnome was created and it's quite silly.
it's just a simple choice of DE, nothing more.
...I'm happy. Even Bluecurve sounded better ;)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Oh now Linux developers are actually trying to make a unified GUI standard? Its sure nice to see everyone moving to the right idea here, but I am sure people will still complain because it is all about 'choice'...
There's a relatively large thread going on in the kde-core-devel mailinglist about such interoperability efforts that you guys might be interested in, too... check out this thread for the whole story.
The short version is - arts, the KDE sound daemon, uses glib code internally, but the maintainer wanted to move the glib code to rely on an externally-installed glib (instead of maintaining a copy of glib in the arts distribution). Lots of developer confusion over this has ensued, but a lot of interesting discussion has also resulted. Check it out.
The one reason that people walk by a Linux system and immediately think it's arcane is typically the use of anti-aliased fonts. People feel much more comfortable learning systems that look pretty. After all, people never bought Windows because it was stable (not that I'm saying this is the only reason or anything, but it certainly helps ...).
In the long run, we're all dead.
What I would like to see is not another technical feat, but an effort to bring the Linux desk top closer to the a-technical masses.
I've recently had the "pleasure" of reinstalling Red Hat Linux and neither Gnome nor KDE are user-friendly at all. Yes, they do copy the Windows 95 desk top, but no, that's not going to help my father. And don't even start about the built-in file/web/help/and-what-not browsers.
With all this high configurability that's available in both windowing systems, couldn't a group of more human-interface oriented people build a layman interface on top of either Gnome or KDE?
In general I found myself agreeing with Aaron
's comments more than the others. The main problem I see with Havoc and Waldo and all the others pushing for more shared technologies across the desktop is the implementation technology. KDE is built from the ground up upon Qt/C++ and this is one of the major reasons for it's considerable success. I see no reason to change this winning strategy.
Recently, we've been discussing the incorporation of Glib into KDE on the core development list. While I am not against this per se, I wonder whether the GNOME developers will ever allow the use of Qt/C++ in any shared technology. It seems to this day that Qt licensing is still a problem for GNOME. One of the greatest ironies in all of Free Software, IMHO.
If Havoc and Waldo are serious about integration then this problem will have to be addressed in earnest. I do not want to see KDE come down a level in technology just so that GNOME apps can integrate into KDE. Better to improve the great applications we currently have in KDE then waste so much time focusing on some elusive merging of these two.
Besides, choice is good and GNOME with KDE offer this. Where we can agree upon specs and closing superficial differences we should and that will help those who choose to use GNOME apps in KDE and vice versa. But please, let's not rearchitect KDE and strip it of Qt.
Seriously, I love the titles we're given these days. Currently I'm a Senior in a Computer Science program... but really, I think I should get a raise and the new title "Education Subscriber" or maybe "Learning Engineer".
Is this type of deal limited only to the Tech Sector, or is everybody throwing about hyphens and "Engineer" to make people sound more important?
Other good tack-on words I can think of would be associate (no, that's not the Fry Cook, that's our Comestibles Associate), analyst (hey, I'm not a waitress, I'm an Order Analyst), and vice president (no, I'm not the bus boy, I'm the VP of Table Maintenence).
-theGreater Cynic.
a unified look and feel to both Gnome and KDE will be great. I would even go further to suggest that someone should write a book in the lines of the M$ book of standards (its a book full of "thats how a window should look like" and "thats how a button should look like" etc.) for the linux environment.
I know this is sort of a blasphemy, after all - linux is about tweaking, but nevertheless its quite irritating to use middle mouse to paste in one program, ctrl-v in the other and shift-insert in the third , without any way of deciding or even a way to know in advance.
just my 2 cents...
I just installed Gentoo, to try out kde 3.1. Well, it is just great. The one problem was this. The FIRST option in Konqueror setting menu is Show Menubar. Click on it by accident (which is easy since it is the first option), and you are in lost world. It was ok for me, since I know how to tinker and find out that control+M turns tyhe menu back (still it was difficult), imagine the newbie hitting this setting. WTF..
...REASON joins the open source movement!!!
Choice is good, when limited. When allowed to run free, its actually a prison unto itself.
Too many GUI's, desktop environments, xfree86 shells, WHATEVER you wanna call them (see there's even too much choice on naming the damn things) and userbases get splintered along with their apps making Linux HARDER not EASIER to use.
A united GUI is the best chance Linux has for a respectable marketshare on the desktop.
And for all you "But you will RUIN my LEENUCKS if you make it easy to use, I like being counter-culture and unique!!!!!" and "Dammit. Choice is sacrosanct! I don't care if NO ONE can figure out how to use Linux, if it doesn't have 500,000 different ways of doing the same thing then it isn't worth installing! Can't you see? Linux is ALL about WASTEFUL and POINTLESS duplication of effort! Why go foward when you can spend eternity going nowhere!!?!?!" people relax. I am sure someone will create a new Linux distro, the "Ub3r L33t Linux Extra-Special Hard To Use" distro with a built in AI that will monitor your usage over time and re-arrainge various commands randomly to keep you on your toes and make sure Linux never becomes "too easy" for you. Legions of filthy unwashed nerds and geeks, dissilusioned by the increasingly easier to use mainstream distros will flock to this new permanently hard to use distro. They will form communities to provide each other with moral support. Real Estate firms will notice a skyrocketing in their sales and rentals of basement unit apartments/condos as the geeks settle in for a lifelong pursuit of sunlight shunning and the disdainment of anything easy or social. Although these geeks and nerds will think their intelligence is par none, they will miss all other technological advances and fall further and further behind the rest of society. When their savings finally runs out and they apply for computer jobs interviewers will be amazed that you've all spent the past 5 years using what will appear to the rest of the world as "DOS Linux". Laughed out of the interview the poor geeks will have to settle for flipping burgers at the local fast food restaurant for a short time until they are replaced by burger flipping robots. Finally realizing their worthlessness to society in general they will join an EverQuest cult where they will all live in massive communes cut off from the rest of the world and live peacefully until someone forgets to pay the EverQuest bill and they all jump off a bridge from mass depression.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Unfortunately, getting such a thing into KDE looks set to be next to impossible. A small but vocal minority appear to be dead-set against using even GObject, which only tackles a small subset of the problem of code sharing - the idea of using GObject seems to scare them witless.
I wouldn't normally name names, but it's starting to get very irritating. Neil Stevens and Zack Rusin in particular, (there are others) consistantly object whenver the possibility of using something based on GObject (even when wrapped in the KDE style) is brought up. I've yet to see them state what is wrong with GObject, beyond "it's not appropriate" or "KDE developers should only have to use Qt C++".
To be honest, this isn't the first time I wish KDE had gone with CORBA. Unfortunately, by dropping it before it matured, they blew a hole in the consistancy of the Linux desktop a mile wide, leaving their answer to "how do we get consistancy" to be "only use KDE apps".
When I look at areas where both Gnome and KDE can both improve, I see the basics. Things like printing. Things like sound setup. CDRW... DVD... improved .jpg and .tiff and other image management & manipulation.
I know the immediate, knee-jerk response is going to be that there are great programs out there which handle all of the things I listed above. The problem is they aren't as integrated into either Gnome or KDE as they SHOULD be. Whether we like it or not, the Microsoft Windows 2k & XP interface is the gold standard for how applications are integrated into the desktop.
What we should be thinking of is how we simplify the integration of applications into both KDE and Gnome desktops.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
"The new start menu is also an abomination. In fact, those two days with Windows XP reminded me why most people hate computers. I'd hate them too if that was all that was out there."
as a linux/freebsd user you would think i wouldn't, but i actually quite like the new start menu. i really like the fact that it adds shortcuts on the fly to your most recently used programs. i think it looks very elegant and it also simplifies a lot of tasks for people such as my mother (the usual metaphor!) in terms of its "My Recent Documents", "Connect To" etc...
my problem here with these guys statements is that they all, and in particular Aaron just makes these swooping opinionated statements without any meat to back them up.
i was also concerned that none of them have much experience with Windows XP. i would assume that apple looks at it all the time to not only imitate things it has done well, but to avoid things it does badly. surely these guys should be analysing osx and XP and doing the same thing?
I find it highly disturbing that they don't use Windows every so often. I mean, come on, Microsoft spends TONS of cash on usability studies and 99% of the world knows Windows.
I don't want an XP clone (although the thought is not that bad) but if you are creating a new UI, XP should be required study. Both for it's good AND bad points.
They should also use OSX, MacOS9, Be, and any other OS worth mentioning on a regular basis. XP is not the be-all-end-all.
Unix is the ONLY OS without a standard GUI.
IMHO, the KDE vs. GNOME battle hurts Linux on the desktop more than it helps. Great, we have choices. But really, if there was a LINUX GUI, not two half-assed UI's, we could be much further along on our way to a really good UI. Red Hat 8.0 is the only distro to "get" this and they were crucified for trying it.
1. The best code from each would have been used and the worst would have been dropped.
2. There would be twice as many developers.
3. Users would not have to choose their problems.
4. Tech support would be possible.
5. Graphical tools could be made for system configuration and packaging if they did not have to support a multitude of OS's.
Too many options is good for a technical individual, too many options is NOT a good thing for a group. If they can't get together, I hope they both fail or lose mindshare. The Linux community would be better off with it's own standard GUI.
It's not the packaging, the number of distro's or X Windows holding Linux back as I hear so often. It's the desktop. The other problems can be solved with a standard GUI.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
MS did a lot of work on this. Maybe a lot of the results are distasteful - but that doesn't mean one should hide one's head in the sand. There may be some good things and some bad things, but choices can be made more intelligently when there is a broad base of knowledge to draw upon.
(Same comments for Mac UI of course...)