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The Definite Desktop Environment Comparison
Gentu writes "OSNews posted a very long and interesting comparison between the most popular desktop environments today: Windows XP Luna, Mac OS X Aqua, BeOS/Zeta and Unix's KDE and Gnome. Some of the points in the article can be thought to be 'subjective', but overall many good points are made and it seems that there is room for improvement for all DEs."
If the dock were more customizable, the ability to have single-left-clickable appleting from the dock, and a few other minor gripes, I'd be happy. As it is, I hide the dock for as long as possible, unless I absolutely need it.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Could it be that XP won because MS dumps millions into research and development of interfaces? Nah thats not it. Nothing to see, keep on moving.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
No consideration is given to the cost of any of the OS's? What percent does one pay for the OS vs. the hardware now? That ratio goes up every year with Windows. What's it is now for Windows XP Professional box? 30%?
Flexibility for Linux (KDE/Gnome) a 7? What is more flexible than an open source operating system?
Chew: You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.
From the article:
The best usability I get is from Windows XP... The user environment does what I expect it to do at any time. 95% of the applications carry out user-interactivity actions exactly like another Windows app would do it... It is just the 'standard', we like it or not.
Ok, this bugs me. The author is basing usability on what he's used to, not necessarily what is most usable. I can't dispute the fact that Windows apps tend to be consistent -- consistency is one of the most important components of usability). But if something is consistently crappy, it's still crappy. Just because someone is trained on one interface and is used to it doesn't make it highly usable from an objective point of view.
It reminds me of a story about a lady who always cut the ends off of the ham before she baked it. One day her kid asked her why she did it. She answered, "because that's the way my mother always did it." She got curious about it though, so she called her mother. Her mother said that she cut off the ends of the ham because that's the way she used to do it. So the lady called her mother's mother, who told her that she cut off the ends of the ham because it wouldn't fit in the pan otherwise.
All that to say that just because you're used to something doesn't mean it is the best way to do it.
47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
I've used both extensively, and KDE wipes the floor with XP. You say I'm lying? Let's do a feature comparison then, shall we?
.NET style.
t ml
1. Which DE comes with tabbed browsing and popup window suppression in its web browser?
KDE
2. Which DE has a file manager that lets you right click on a directory and open up a terminal right in that directory?
KDE
3. Which DE has multiple desktop abilities out of the box?
KDE
4. Which DE comes with an office suite?
KDE
5. Which DE comes with a download manager?
KDE (3.1 comes with kget which integrates with konqueror)
6. Which DE comes with source code and its own professional IDE -- all for free?
KDE
7. Which DE pisses you off with product activation?
XP
'nuff said
Oh, and don't use Keramik, it sucks, use something like the new
Screenshot of my desktop:
http://www.insanebaboon.netfirms.com/desktop2.h
I know you were kidding, but here's "my take" :-)
DosShell sucked a lot, 1dir was kinda usable, Norton commander sucked somewhat and the two windows made it unusable on 80-column DOS screens.
The king was and will always be XTree. It was incredbly powerful, easy-to-use and consistent.
To this day Windows Explorer hasn't even come close.
Too bad the Johnson guy got sick. I hope he gets again in good shape. We need his magic in Linux.
Also, he did a good thing with XTree... maybe he deserved more.
OK, I'm not here to advertise for KDE, and I am in no way affiliated with KDE. With that said, I love KDE 3.1
KDE 3 was nice, but it still lacked some things. With 3.1, I feel like I'm in a clean, visually appealing, fast(yes fast in X) desktop environment. Some people say that the visual appearance of a desktop environment is not important, but considering that I have to look at it for at least 1/2 of my day, I'd prefer it looked inviting. I'd like to hear what other people have to say about this or Gnome.
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
what's up with them in windows?
combo boxes STILL suck.
the rows of tabs that flip and change position are the single most unnerving UI element ever conceived. you click one element and the entire geography of the context you're in flips. what was stable a millisecond ago is now reorded.
it's like a battle axe poised against the very wiring of your short term memory.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
While I'm not a software developer, I was under the impression that almost all of these complaints about fixed sized dialog boxes, windows, and controls extending off the edges of the screen were due to poor programming practices.
I fail to see how they're really the fault of Windows itself. (Granted, they could probably incorporate some sort of bounds checking or limitations, so such poor coding would be disallowed.) Still, I think it's more of a case of them giving developers all the tools they need to generate fixed *or* variable size boxes and controls - and said developers making poor decisions.
I remember, for example, in older verisons of the Cakewalk MIDI sequencer, selecting "use large fonts" under your video settings in Windows '9x would cause text not to fit inside the grids drawn on the screen. That was corrected eventually in later updates to the software.
This guy is a microsoft lover. They haven't done anything new to their interface since Windows 95. ooooo they just got themes in Win XP and won't be getting multiple desktops until Longhorn comes out. Sure agree that beos was a step in the right direction and sad to see it go. Don't dis KDE and Gnome!
What do you think those applications do? Are they easy to use? Wouldn't just about every user be able to figure out what they are and how you use them?
With Linux Notepad is called VI and in the 4 years I've used Linux I still haven't figured out how to use it. So the first thing I do is install Nano, which I know to do because I've installed Debian (which I uninstalled because the tulip driver that came with it at the time was not compatible with my Linksys ethernet card, which requires the tulip driver, but like a different tulip driver). Of course I need to install Ncurses first because Nano wont install without it. But my system comes with Ncurses, its fairly common. But its the wrong version. So before I edit I install both.
Seems like a lot of work just because the average distribution doesn't think like a light load computer user.
Simple, useful applications like Nano (based on my old good friend, Pico!) are fairly common. It shouldn't be THAT difficult to put together a short list of basic applications that would define the base Linux operating system. Name them SANELY (Nano sounds cute, but it needs to sound something like what it is). Include command line applications and X applications. KISS, but cover your bases. Not with extra apps, just look at Windows if you need to know what your average new user needs. Plan on something going wrong, "you don't need Nano, VidConfigureX will configure that for you!" just doesn't cut it.
Linux configuration is getting pretty close to standardized, why does every distribution contain a custom tool set? I'd like to learn this once and I cant see a good technical reason that I can't. Make one skinnable, so distros can make it fit nicely into their vision, but make it consistent.
Adopt a single installation scheme. Everyone knows VISE and it does the trick. Custom packaging is great, their will always be someone smarter out their with a better way. But I'm a big fan of the Loki installer, because it works and because it looks good and makes me feel like I know what's going on. Those things are important.
I don't think any single thing I've mentioned doesn't already exist. I just doesn't exist in any one place. That's ironic because where talking about market penetration without even talking advantage of what we've already got.
Give me a basic distro with what I've mentioned above. Add a package management system like portage and unite Gnome and KDE and you've got a desktop revolution.
Until then its just boys and toys.
Quack, quack.
What does that have to do with anything I wrote? DisplayPostscript has been available for X11 commercially since before Linux even existed, back when Apple was barely past black-and-white Macs.
XFree86 4 used to ship with a DPS extension (based on a donated IBM DPS implementation, I believe), but that isn't being developed anymore because X11 now has better mechanisms for doing the same thing. Look at the DPS site for the rationale. If you like, you can still download and use it. And if you want to see what the open source equivalent of Cocoa is doing, look at the GNUstep site.
Basically, the mainstream, about a decade ago, tried and abandoned the graphics architecture that Apple has chosen for OS X. Now, the use of PDF fixes some problems with DPS, and one can argue that machines are faster now so it doesn't matter as much anymore, but I don't think so.
In a very REAL practical sense, I can't do stuff in Gnome or KDE that I can do easily in Mac OS X.
And I fully agree with that. But that's not what we are talking about here. What we are talking about is whether that is a limitation of the underlying technology (X11 vs. Quartz) or whether it is an implementation choice by the implementors of the desktop, and I argue it is the latter.
I predict you will see X11-based desktops with all the pizazz of Mac OS X and little of the Mac OS X bloat and overhead within a couple of years.
The one main thing I really hate about OSX and macs in general is that when you click the X in the top right it should close the program completly. Why would you have a close button like that and not actually close and remove the program from memory. Espically if it is just one instance of the program. If you aren't really thinking about it, it is very easy to have a ton of stuff loaded in memory which you then have to go make two clicks to exit. Bah. Also, they need to have a better ability to open a program and have a one click ability to make the program go full screen. Having to drag everything out to full screen gets quite annoying. Luckily it's just my wife that uses mac's for the most part (graphic design) and I get to use my windows and linux boxes that are much more intuitive. Oh, and to those who complain about the color scheme of XP luna well all you have to do is select the silver color scheme and you have the best looking version of windows around. Very "professional." Significantly more so than a dock at the bottom that pops up with 8 icons and whatnot that bounce around. KDE and Windows just are more usable with a docking bar that shows what you actually have open and an idea of what it is you are looking at. A little black arrow under an icon in OSX of a program that might be closed yet still loaded in memory is just not helpful in the least.
UNIX-based systems have (what I consider) an elegant way of dealing with partitions. Every partition is 'grafted' onto the root tree.
Windows 2000 and XP can do a single root (with the exception of the floppy drive) if you're into that sort of thing. You can mount a drive anywhere on an NTFS partition. Use the Assign command in the DiskPart command-line utility, or in disk manager, right-click on the partition and pick Change Drive Letters and Paths. Most people are used to drive letters though, so you don't see this feature used very often.
You say that KDE has never crashed on you but Konqueror has? What's the difference? Were you browsing the web, or a list of files at the time?
The difference is that only one process crashes, others keep on going. There is no effective parent-child relationship to browsing a directory tree and browsing the web when you use Konqueror; Konqueror doesn't even run on its own when KDE desktop is running. Windows is a different story, it runs explorer all the time.
Another point is that yes - Konqueror has crashed on me more than once, let me see - 3 times, but IE has crashed on me more often, seems like every time I use it. So has MS Office, and XP itself - rebooted or dumped memory. There is no way, in my experience, XP should be getting anywhere close to acceptable for stability, much less over KDE. That's my experience.
It was far from Definitive. For the Unix side there should have been some light weight and middle wieght Window Managers such as:
Blackbox or Fluxbox
Window Maker
Enlightenment
Blackbox will do everything you need -- fast.
I am using KDE though because I like the in my face eye candy.
If a desktop is inseperable from the rest of the OS, there sould have been a catagory for baggage.
XP destop bring the following baggage that can not be left behind:
Spyware
Product activation
trojan EULA's for service packs
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
... actually I stopped reading when he started complaining about the lack of keyboard support in OS X. This person apparently has not spent enough time on the platform to learn about full keyboard access. His ramblings about ALT keys and so on leave me thinking ... what? I'm trusting this person to tell me what a useable system is? When he apparently hasn't used OS X for more than a day or two? When his main reason for liking Windows is that he's used to it? No thanks.
simon
home page
There are some interesting things happening with window managers, which cannot happen on other platforms due to Xs lack of interface policy. It would have been interesting if the author had looked at the following:
FluxBox
Ion
PekWM
TreeWM
WindowLab
Next time maybe...
Any desktop enviroment that does not let you push (lower) a window down on the window stack is fundamentally crippled.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.