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."

Comments

Sigh..

[Sh0t]

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.

Interoperability is king

[nitehorse]

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.

Re:Interoperability is king

[nitehorse]

I think that a lot of the problem with GObject is (in most KDE developers' minds) is that we feel it's a hack for C to help make OO programming available, where OO is much more readily available in other languages.

The OO paradigm wasn't around when C was designed, and C certainly is an awkward language to use OO in.

It's the difference between saying:

QPushButton *button = new QPushButton("Hello, world!");

and:

GtkButton *button = gtk_button_new_with_label("Hello, World!");

In one case, you have clearly defined language-level constructs and rules about what happens when you use said constructs; using the 'new' keyword on any object means that the language will automatically call the constructor for the object in question.

So instead of having to write a x_button_new_with_specific_property function, you define a class with the properties, and the proper constructors (because C++ has rules about how constructors get called, instead of forcing the programmer to remember a name mapping for every _new function with every possible permutation of the _with_property names at the end).

I support GObject personally insofar as it is used for the language bindings, because programming GTK in ruby or python should be easy and fun and take full advantage of the OO properties of those languages; but for use in C? Thanks, but no thanks.

Usability and Fonts

[silvakow]

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 ...).

Re:As long as the result isn't Knome...

[CoolVibe]

I hope KDE drops that whole K-naming gimmick. Although I love KDE, and I use it every day, it's the one thing that I find downright irritating.

So, I plea to everyone that develops new KDE apps, _DON'T_ use that silly K-ism shtick. It was fun the first two versions. It's getting old. Be original for a change, okay? Thanks.

Unnecessary

[tgv]

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?

Integration across the desktop

[manyoso]

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.

Useability Engineer?

[theGreater]

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.

one API. one look.

[CreatorOfSmallTruths]

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...

Keep Dangerous options away, please!

[rithvik]

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..

Re:As long as the result isn't Knome...

[supergiovane]

If you want, you can try my Kremoveinitial, a very useful utility which removes the K initial from every KDE app on your disk.

Disclaimer: it's still beta and very buggy, but in case of necessity

ill -9 kremoveinitial

should solve any problem

Re:Common object model

[nitehorse]

Well, it's still not possible for me to access those distributed objects from the command line.

I can tell my media player (Kiwi) to go to the next song with this command from a script, or the command line, or from another app:

dcop kiwi KiwiIFace nextTrack

Talking with a few GNOME developers, it seems that something this simple, this useful, is still not possible in GNOME (Please, correct me if it is! I hate being misinformed).

As far as the 'distributed' nature of CORBA: Can you show me how to take advantage of this? I can't find any documentation on the Net about it, and the APIs in CORBA are hopelessly complicated (even for me to understand, and I'm a developer...). If my Gnumeric object is on another machine, how will Evolution embed that Gnumeric object locally to show a spreadsheet? Is that even possible? IIUC, it's supposed to be, but I've yet to see it done.

The language-neutrality I'll give you, but in response to that: How many useful Bonobo parts are being implemented in Python? How about ruby? Or Perl? Or maybe Smalltalk, or Java? No? Why are they all in C, if the language doesn't matter? (Again, correct me if I'm wrong - but I've yet to see a Bonobo part implemented in C++, let alone any scripting language.)

In short, I find that the KDE technology gives us flexibility that we don't see in GNOME, and it works plenty fast enough for our uses, while also being easily accessible to new developers.

When I was adding new DCOP functions to Kiwi (having never used DCOP before) it took me all of twenty minutes to figure it out; once I had figured it out, adding the second DCOP function took five minutes. How long do you suppose it takes a new GNOME developer to get up-to-speed on using ORBit?

Know thy enemy/ Too much is simply too much

[FullCircle]

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.