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KDE 3.2: A User's Perspective
Karma Sucks writes "In KDE 3.2 - A User's Perspective (mirror), W. Kendrick gives an incredible visual overview of some of the lesser known features of KDE. Together with a recent article on GNOME, it's become clear that the Linux desktop has all but surpassed proprietary alternatives."
Thought you might appreciate a mirror , as well as a downloadable copy (about 3.6 meg).
Mod up with 'underrated' instead of 'informative,' otherwise I'll use your karma points to troll at +1 later.
~Darl the Honest Troll
It's become clear that the Linux desktop has all but surpassed proprietary alternatives.
Now that's a phrase I'm sure even Microsoft can agree with. Let me rephrase it for you:
"The Linux desktop has everything proprietary alternatives have, but the proprietary alternatives are better."
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
has all but surpassed proprietary alternatives.
Comment 1: Haven't we been here for years, now? "Linux is almost ready", "We've all but surpassed windows", etc.
Comment 2: We won't have a desktop that can compete with windows until we still fix the stupid things that are inherent to x-windows WM's. All I want in life is to be able to cut-and-paste reliably between applications. Text, and pictures, mind you, and in a perfect world, spreadsheet data. You know what else would be nice? If it were faster - i.e. didn't have to go through unix sockets to do anything. Or if it didn't have to render all image files into bitmaps offscreen to display them.
No, we've still got a long way to go. I do really like a good gnome desktop running ximian, it's true, and it's getting better. But, sorry, we're no where near the "it just works" of apple / winxp.
~Will
sig?
I disagree. This is an above average (but not perfect) error message. Error messages should state:
1) That an error occurred. This part should be clean and readable to an end user.
2) The program, process, or whatever caused it.
3) The condition that caused the error.
4) The target that was being operated upon.
This error has #2 (klauncher) and #4 (kio-audiocd). It almost has #3 (Could not start process, unable to create io-slave). The only problem here is that it is not entirely helpful to say what you were not able to do, you must say what condition was not met. For example "Unable to open file foo.txt" is not helpful. But "File foo.txt does not exist" or "File foo.txt does not have write access" tells us exactly what we need to change to fix the problem. Similary, "Could not start process Unable to create io-slave" is not great. At least we know why the process could not start: it is because it could not create the io-slave kio-audiocd. Better might be "io-slave kio-audiocd reports access denied" or "kio-audiocd not found" or "signal 11 from kio-audiocd"
Anyhow, the point of an error message isn't to be pretty or grammatically correct. It is to provide the information necessary to identify and solve the problem. Better to have a cryptic message with all the info you need, than a long wordy grammitcally correct message that doesn't tell you anything. With the above error message, someone can call a technician, or a geek, or post on a forum, and the message is unique enough that they can get a relevant response. That is what is most important.
Really there isn't just one question to ask. You could ask any of the following.
1. The one that usually gets asked: "Will Windows users who switch find Linux easier to use than windows?" This is obviously a loaded question. making this the standard pretty much ensures that Windows come out ahead.
2. A little better: "If first time users are plunked down in front of a bunch of desktops, which one will they find easiest to use?" This is at least a fair comparison, but given that few users are first time users, the answer isn't very interesting (and I think OS X wins).
3. Better still: "After users have learned to use a bunch of different desktops, which one do they find easiest to use, and most useful?" This is a fair questions, and the answer actually matters. I use Windows, OS X, and Linux (Gnome usually) on a daily basis and I think Linux wins this one.
4. Best: "Which desktop combines a managable learning curve, and is most useful onced learned." This is really where Linux runs into problems. For some people the learning curve on Linux is still too steep. If they learned how to use it they would find it more useful, and even easier to use, but getting to that point is still too hard for some people.
Linux has been desktop-ready since 1991, it's just that the majority of users haven't been ready for it.
God, how I hate reading this. It's people like you with arrogant statements like your's above that give the OpenSource community a bad reputation.
Face it: What is revolutionary about GNU/Linux is its model of development and distributuion. Technically speaking, for a typical Joe User there is little or nothing new. Regarding the GUI, we mostly take the best (or what we perceive to be best) from other OS, like Windows, MacOS, Irix, AmigaOS etc. Nothing wrong with this approach, but it's not that the Linux GUI is constantly 5 years ahaed of what users can grasp.
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
Let me play the devil's advocate... I feel strongly about the opensource philosophy that someone would be able to label me a "zealot."
/etc/fstab, change all hda's to hde's, chroot to that partition, run lilo, and reboot. This would be a nightmare for someone that is not familiar with the details of linux.
However, I think there are some things that are still not "there yet" with linux. Here is something that happenned to me yesterday. I added a new disk on my dell optiplex, moved the primary IDE cable to secondary (long set of wrong experimentation to get the bios to recognize the disk). The windows (xp) side booted off fine and said new devices were added, blah blah...
The linux partition made me go crazy. It decided that the original hda is now hde (the disk was a SATA disk, so the ide cabling change shouldn't have messed the configuration badly). Anyway, the system "paniced" and the only way to get it back was to use a linux boot disk, run rescue, mount the partitions, edit
It is not just a question of "are windows users ready". It is a question of, "do things fail gracefully"? Or, "do simple things get reconfigured automatically in a decent manner?"
Same thing with CD/DVD burning. The options are a bit un-intuitive, and I couldn't get a DVD burned on linux to mount on any other system (though it is an ISO9660 -- may be a problem with the options I provided, but as a person that dragged a bunch of files and burned onto the DVD, I would expect that the program defaults are going to be decent).
Anyway, the system I have is Mandrake 9.2, and 10.0 beta. DVD issues were with 9.2 version.
S
"After users have learned to use a bunch of different desktops, which one do they find easiest to use, and most useful?" This is a fair questions, and the answer actually matters. I use Windows, OS X, and Linux (Gnome usually) on a daily basis and I think Linux wins this one.
I think, while this may be the case, it's actually the applications we should look on. To me, a desktop on you computer is like the physical desktop at work: Sure, some come with nice drawers and others com with tables that can be lifted electrically, rather than by cranking. But it's the tools you use for work that matter, not how neatly they are sorted.
To me, any improvement on Gimp, OpenOffice, (etc) is more important than some new feature in KDE or Gnome. Because the desktop is just a way to get to the applications I do my work in.
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
I noticed that. I also noticed the plethora of information on the screen describing the resolution/bit-depth of the display settings. What immediately went through my head was, "too much information!"
One of the things I have done to make money in the past is provide tech support for Joe and Jane Computer User. Not power users. Not Photoshop geniuses. Not people who program for the fun of it or who have a favorite Linux distribution. The most important thing I learned from dealing with people like this is that they're not Slashdot readers. They're not MacNN or Windows site readers, either. They don't care about which OS is better than the other, or which graphics card gets the most FPS. They think of their computers as toys or tools, much in the same way they think about microwaves or TVs. And what they want, most of all, is for their machines to work, period. If they work - get email, surf the web, play games and display porn - interest ends.
Concerns about usability and GUI design aside, the greatest barrier to wider acceptance I see in the Linux community I see is a sense of elitism to which some members of the community seem to be attached. Now, I want to make it clear I am not talking about the Linux community as a whole, nor am I attempting to start some silly OS flamewar. I have, however, seen a consistent trend of elitism and a defense of elitism in posts here and elsewhere. The elitism takes the form of an attachment of importance to certain technical and/or obscure areas of understanding and an assumption that the understanding of these metrics and their concomitant languages implies the speaker is part of the Linux community, as opposed to a member of another group.
Fr'example, how many threads here evolve into minute discussions of thread scheduling, micro- versus monolithic-kernel structures, memory subsystems, etc.? And, more importantly, how many of these threads include comments which attach a larger importance to these topics - if you don't understand how much better the journaling capabilities of Linux are when compared to Windows or OS X then you're obviously an idiot and should go on using your stupid Windows box!
I bring this up because, in my opinion, this is the exact wrong focus needed to help Linux gain widespread home usage. My experience with Joe and Jane Computer User is that they don't care about any of this shit. And, more importantly, they are right not to care about any of this shit. This is the crux, because it is here that the idea that superior technical knowledge means one is correct runs headlong into the reality of the marketplace, which is that superior technical ability isn't nearly as important as the ability to gets one's message across to people who see their computer as just another home appliance. Mention the name of Steve Jobs here and you're asking for a fight, but one thing he understands possibly better than anyone else in the industry is that you have to give average people reasons to use a computer which have nothing to do with better journaling and everything to do with fitting the machine into their lives. Dell has done this by making the computer another commidity. Apple has done this by elevating the computer above the status of beige-box-tool. The Linux community, as a whole, can't seem to decide on a way to do this.
I know I am not describing the Linux community as a whole. I am describing a particular subset of the community, a subset which is extremely vocal. I also know that this zealot mentality exists the Mac and Windows world's as well. However, as both the Mac and Windows world's have significant market and mindshare penetration into the home market, the zealot communities are mediated by those who understand the need to present another front to the average user. I
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
I think the (valid, somewhat) point he makes is that Linux as such is a very viable desktop OS. However, most people don't want a desktop OS, they want to use what they know - MS Windows. People are trained to use Windows, and other desktops, while good alternatives, are still different.
For the hard disk stuff: your distro should have used LABEL=/ instead of /dev/hda in your fstab, and avoided this problem.
Of course if you do that, and you add another disk with the same label, things get dicey.
As for the DVD: if you want a data DVD, why are you formatting it as a CD? DVDs are supposed to be UDF, not ISO9660.
In fact, it's a miracle Linux mounted that disk. And a minor one that some app bothered creating it!
What is an io-slave and why were you trying to create it?
What is klauncher?
What is 'kio-audiocd'?
Why was there an error loading kio-audiocd?
What are the likely causes of this error?
I'm not sure what it was the error dialog was in response to (even the mirror is slashdotted now), but here's what I think would be a better error dialog for the average user:Then go ahead and add a small "debug info" button that has the previous information of use to developers. End users have a pretty fair chance of solving this one. The 5% of those who have some other problem can then use the extra information and google for it.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
The 5% of those who have some other problem can then use the extra information and google for it.
Could this not be another button on the dialog? ("Search for solutions to this problem...")
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT
Message-ID:
Date: 5 Oct 91 05:41:06 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?
Look at that date, October 1991. That's incredible. It was ready for the desktop since 1991, according to you.
Not according to this site, http://ragib.hypermart.net/linux/
And I quote: "By December came version 0.10. Still Linux was little more than in skeletal form. It had only support for AT hard disks, had no login ( booted directly to bash). version 0.11 was much better with support for multilingual keyboards, floppy disk drivers, support for VGA,EGA, Hercules etc."
So basically, in 1991, LINUX DID NOT EVEN HAVE A FULLY FUNCTIONING FLOPPY DRIVER OR EVEN EGA SUPPORT, and it was "ready" for the desktop? You have taken mindless Linux evangelism to a brand new level of insanity.