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."

Comments

Usability

[_fuzz_]

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.

KDE 3.1

[miketang16]

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.