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Gnome 2.6 Usability Review
TuringTest writes ""The user-centric UI webzine" UserInstinct has published a usability overview of the latest version of the GNOME desktop. While their conclusions and recommendations are not mind-blowing, it includes two interesting appendices with a survey of new users (and their reactions to the system) and a list of common tasks of modern computer users with a commentary on how Gnome performs in each one. Note that usually You Only Need to Test With 5 Users (this report tests 4), you need to test additional users when an interface has several highly distinct groups of users and thus the conclusions in this review should not be taken as definitive."
Not 5? Well, this is worthless then. Listen to useability/web design guru Nielsen!
Hello,
I have started a little project which is intended to get the GNOME Desktop into a different direction. It's not aimed for people who love GNOME as it is now - No, it's more aimed to those who are experts to Unix and who like and wish so many times that some of the changes that went into GNOME never happened. The project was started yesterday and the first patches to *fix* the buttonorder (as one of many ideas and points) were created already. I plan to create the outstanding *fixes* for correcting the buttonorder in the upcoming days (as I have time) and then like to head over to other things that I personally like to have fixed. The project is not aimed to be a cooperation with the core GNOME it's more private work that I started for my own needs.
In case someone is interested then feel free to read more about it on the Project GoneME page. Please do not expect huge wonders, it's just a test to see if people might be interested or not. As said it mainly covers my own interests at the moment. Please also don't put to much value in my brought up project description, they need to be reworked and altered anyways. I wrote the stuff as they came into my mind.
Task #1 - Email
* Clicked Applications right away
* Discovered "Internet"
* Discovered "Web Browser"
(The above happened in less than 10 seconds)
* Ignored "Start Here"
* User admitted to not being used to clicking on Start Here and decided to go looking after the desktop did not have an internet icon
* Clicked URL bar
* Typed in URL
* Logged in
* "Fuck no I don't want to do that" referring to saving passwords, never saves passwords at home
* Read mail
Guess GNOME really IS a terrible user interface, haha. (Before you mod me as a troll, RTFA, they actually say this.)
It's good to see a fairly unbaised, objective look at an open source product on Slashdot. Many times, we see either a "OMG Open Source = good" or a "I couldn't even get it installed, this sucks!" in place of an actual review. In this instance, it seems as though the reviewers actually tried to make this a fair review. They used users with different experience levels to get an overall picture of the usability of Gnome 2.6. While they could have used more than one user for each stereotype for statistical reasons, it seems at though they have done a decent job in their review. It is reviews like this that show us what to work on.
http://www.linspire.com/RunLinspireFlash.php
ion2
/usr/ports/x11-wm/ion-2
For those with FreeBSD who hate the mouse...
# cd
# make install
'What the hell is "GNOME-gegl2.png"? "That's disgusting!"'
Why isn't there an open source attempt to model what the folks in Cuppertino are doing? KDE and Gnome are both Windows copies. I think folks would switch in droves if they could get an open-source Mac copy to run on their PC hardware.
I can't think of any incentive for switching from an XP interface to one that is almost as good as XP.
I tried hard to use Gnome 2.6 as my primary desktop, but I gave up in favor of KDE.
Some reasons:
-Too slow
-not so well integrated
-doesn't feel a unified system(shortcuts, menus, etc)
-Again, too slow. Every release it gets slower.
The have changed enlightenment for sawfish, then for the actual wm.
The same happened for the file manager: gmc, then nautilus
And for the browser: galeon, nautilus, epiphany, now mozilla?
A very poor control center. Example: try to add virtual desktops from the control center. It's impossible, it's hidden in the desktops applets.
It's a mess, since the people funding the project dedicated to other things, Gnome seems to have lost direction.
To me, Gnome is just a desktop bar, all the enviroment and other apps doesn't feel really integrated.
Omar
Has anyone done usability tests on GNOME (or KDE for that matter) with respect to internationalization? Last time I checked, most applications are written just for the English speaker and typer. It seems like to get a good setup with all the programs in the appropriate language, you need to restrict yourself to a specialized distribution..which isn't a great option if you need to support more than one language.
With gtk2's new input module support, it has made it easier to input languages which require a more complex method, but that is only limited to those gtk2 programs. So if you were using KDE, I think you would have to use input methods that talk through X, which are very unfriendly. On the other hand, it seems like windows has the advantage here of everything using the same toolkit which has pretty good internationalization support.
In any menuing system, there is no rule that says that the menu has to be a true tree. There's nothing stopping you from having a main menu of "What are you here to do today?", and having the most popular functions being placed in more than one position on the interface.
Doing it that way might lead to a more confusing set of decisions at design time, but the user will more often than not find themselves one click away from what they want to do next if you do it right. Afterall, it's easier to find any given option if it's "hidden" in three places instead of just one.
I feel it is mainly because in an open source world there is less of an ability to strictly test usability and functionality, as this requires a different set of abilities than purely that of programming expertise.
Indeed, when there are already a couple of tried and tested UI's on the market (i.e. Windows and OS-X). And with the money having already been spent on user testing the interfaces, the question is why re-invent the wheel?
Build on what has already been developed.
Once the underlying core has been built then experimentation can begin, with the many eyes approach hopefully leading to an even more intuitive OS and GUI.
I like the idea of creating a HIG certification program of sort, but not for Gnome, but for all of the Unix/Linux desktop. Why? If you have a Gnome certification then of course core Gnome gnome apps will strive to be compliant and so will some others, but it wont really go farther than that.
Maybe start a freedesktop.org project. This way open office, KDE, Gnome, SDL, wine (hehe), and other applications will be interested in making sure that their applications are compliant. It will probably be harder, but the payoff will be a hundred times better. Not only will you get Gnome apps all interacting with each other, but you will have all the rest of the Linux/BSD/Unix apps working alone side nicely.
Another reason why this would be a good freedeskop.org project is because all of the other work that is being done there. Stuff like making sure your application uses the standard desktop icon names when referencing icons (so either Gnome or KDE icon sets work in both KDE and Gnome apps).
Having a little list of current compliment HIG applications would be a major incentive for apps to get on that list too. Maybe it would even spawn a little compitition about keeping/getting all of their apps (kde/gnome/etc) compliant.
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
When users become more accustom to computers and they are intermediate, some users will charge head on into things and get them selves into trouble. Some don't. It just depends.
But I've observed MANY people in my short career of helping neighbors and friends and such with their computers. When they are beginners, they fall into one of three categories. The first is those who hate the comptuer and fight it all the way. They learn how to do a thing or two and use that, and that's it. They won't do anything more because they could break something, etc. It's more than being hesitant.
The second group would include my little sister. They learn what they're doing and will explore a tiny bit, but by and large stick to what they know how to do and programs they know. In those programs, they may explore and they'll become very familiar and comfortable with them. But when it comes to doing something new, they are hesitant.
The third group is hesitant about everything. They are like the first group in that they never branch out into new things (group two will over time, very slowly). They just stick to what they know. That said, they don't feel like they are fighting the computer and are comfortable using the program. But they do no exploring like group two. They only learn things when they need them, and ignore them the rest of the time.
Thinking about it the only group I can think of who ISN'T hesitant is the very little kid. I'm talking 2 or 3 years old. They don't know to be scared of the computer (or even consider being scared of it). They'll plow into the computer head on and they may break it. But I wouldn't consider these kids "users"; at least in the normal sense. They may use a program or two (Putt Putt Goes to the Moon, The Busy World of Richard Scarey, whatever) but they don't use the computer, you know what I mean?
So in conclusion, there really aren't many "non-hesitant" users out there. They would be a rare bird (in my expiriance).
An interesting article though.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Are they both putting the same amount of effort in making their desktops user-friendly?
:)
/. - most people dissing one or the other desktop are pretty clueless fanboys that only embarrass the mature users and developers of their chosen desktop.
I would say that Gnome has had it as an explicit focus for a lot longer than KDE, and has been working a lot more on various aspects of usability. One example is the (always ongoing) effort to make the desktop fully accessible to people with disabilities - an effort that pays off for the rest of us as well, in the form of a more consistent desktop and some fun toys (like screen readers) to play with
As to which desktop is actually the better one for you - well, that's up to you, really. Try both for a time, and select the one you are more comfortable with. Or don't choose; alternate between both as the mood strikes you. Either desktop's applications work fine under both, after all, and interoperability between them is steadily improving.
What you absolutely should do is to ignore all the flamewars and sniping on places like
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Nope, it isn't. Gnome does not use "Cancel" or "OK". If you find a dialogue that uses those, please file a bug report.
What you have is: the safe choice to the left; the unsafe choice to the right; and other, less frequent choices in between.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Ali,
While I completeley disagree with your feelings about where the GNOME project has taken things (I think they should have gone much further and totally flipped off the unix geeks and shouldn't have blindly copied so many of microsoft's mistakes), I do respect you for your decision to fork, as the GNOME guys have been complete and utter jackasses about many things (such as usability, or lack thereof). I have had the same idea as you, albeit to fork GNOME in a completely opposite direction with the Clarux project and making GNOME far more mac-like. While I totally disagree with what you're doing, I'm glad at least someone had the same idea, even if it does run counter to mine.
One piece of advice to the opposition: the Free Software community says they promote freedom, but often, that's not the case. A while back, I created a fork of KDE that removed some really stupid usability problems the project had refused to deal with for years. I provided all my changes as source code people could download, I complied with the GPL, but Freshmeat refused to post the project because they considered it "only a patch". If you do something considered "significant" like modify someone else's code, it can be considered a distribution. But if you modify something that the Free Software community considers "insignificant", like the user experience, it's only considered "a patch". People in the Free Software development community might tell you "if you think you can do better, make your own version"; the thing is, they don't really mean it. So I'm warning you now, if you are really planning on forking a major desktop environment, you won't be able to rely on traditional community outlets for promoting it.
Last piece of advice--post as yourself. Stop this silly oGaLaxYo/Anonymous Coward crap. Post as Ali Agaa, be proud of your opinion, and be proud of what you're trying to stand up for and accomplish (even if it is rather silly).
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Also, how about Chinese user, Hebrew user, Arabic user, to test language differences in the interface. How about blind user, disabled user? Even illiterate user? I am not joking. Check out the Simputer.
If you're being paid to work on Gnome for a business, do more of what that businesses clients want. Not less. Currently, most Red Hat staff/customers (who aren't Gnome developers) don't like spatial nautilus. A challenge for the Gnome devs is to either convince those people otherwise (by making it better or explaining its usefullness, not overriding people preferences). If they can't, it shouldn't be the default for EL4.
You can take their review as gospel all you want, I'll continue to read reviews from people that have withstood the test of time and had a bit more scrutiny.
You can choose your reviews based on ad hominem criteria involving post counts; I'll choose my reviews based on the abstract and then weigh each conclusion based on the evidence that the review presents.
The Linux kernel and the GNOME desktop did NOT GET IN THE WAY of the applications for those users.
:)
You're correct about too much time being spent on the applications. But that's how most users operate. They spend the MINIMUM time possible interacting with the desktop and the MAXIMUM time interacting with the applications. (Aside from playing with backgrounds and sounds. I hate webshots.)
Personally, I think that a tiny bit of work on that study and the NEXT study would show Linux being incredibly easy to use even for novices.
#1. Get rid of the unstable apps. Each icon that they click on MUST launch an application and that application MUST be the most stable of the bunch.
#2. Populate the desktop with the apps they'll be trying to find (nothing like making it easy for them). This is what I do at work. And remove any other icons. They can put other ones there when they are more comfortable with the system.
#3. Put the controls for changing the background and the sounds in a very visible location and name them something like "Cool effects". Then give them lots of pictures and sounds to choose from.
So, the desktop would have the "My Computer" (or whatever) icon.
The "My Network Places" (or whatever) icon.
The "Recycle Bin" (or whatever) icon.
The "Work applications" folder/link icon.
The "Cool effects" folder/link icon.
The "Games" folder/link icon.
The "Help" icon (context searchable, etc).
Also, once you've run through with each of the testers the first time, have them form small groups and run through the test again. In the workplace, they will talk to each other and share tips/hints/ways to install spyware crap/etc.
Does the desktop facilitate or hinder that kind of human interaction?
And toss in a screensave as a background option just to give them something that Windows doesn't do.
Did you really mean Unix experts, or did you mean Windows experts?
Do you have some justification to offer for your changes other than, "Windows does it that way?" And what does the way Windows does thing have to do with so-called Unix experts.
I completely fail to understand what the big deal is with the Gnome button order. I have been a Windows user since Windows 3.1 and a computer user since many years before that.
I have used Gnome. Until someone mentioned it on Slashdot, it never occurred to me that it was somehow difficult to understand the button order. In fact, the "button order" as an object of any thought or criticism had never occurred to me.
Frankly: what is the problem here? Do you operate your computer in a dark, smokey room while wearing sunglasses? Or is your Gnome installation suffering from a misconfiguration issue such that buttonfaces are flat blank and you must guess as to their function?
If you can make Gnome better, then by all means do so. But I'm just having a difficult time conceiving of how it might come to be that this is an issue for someone. Utterly mad.
For that reason I'm a big advocate of making the desktop skinnable/themeable - as opposed to modifying individual applications. They result in user's having to pause and wonder why "X" particular application looks and behaves differently to the rest of the desktop.
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
Its lunch time so i thought I would throw my hat in the ring.
:)
I have been using Gnome 2.6 for i guess a few months now and I have to say it is excellent. I used to use fluxbox (a great WM) but to be honest I haven't really looked back.
I use it nightly as a desktop workstation. I do everything on it from developing firmware for Atmel micros, GUIs in GTK2, web browsing, warez downloading and playing enemy territory.
Gnome 2.6 is faily well intergrated these days. Generally a right click on something will bring up options with what you can do, Left click selects - its nice and predictable. Ctrl-C Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V work as they do in Windows - very cool.
Straight after installation I could do drag and drop burning (good for making an mp3 cds for my car). Another thing that has me impressed are all the cool system tray apps that come with it. They are easy to add and handy too. Right now I have one for net, one for cpu and one for local weather. The Local weather one is awesome as I can always have my finger on the pulse.
I can't say I like spatial browsing though. Not default at least. Personally I found it really frustrating. Its not like i didn't give it a go either - I had it in spatial mode for about a month. It spreads like a cancer across your workspace. Before you know it you have waaaaaay too many windows open. Hiding the address bar is pretty stupid too imho - it makes it really easy to get lost and confused (especially when spatial mode decides you need 3 windows open to traverse 3 directorys). Perhaps if spatial mode didn't open a new window each time (or swapped middle and left click functions), and showed where you were I wouldn't mind it as much. My problem with spatial browsing was solved when i turned it off
Another dislike is definitely the file select dialog. Who makes a file select dialog where entering the text yourself is not an option? Would it really have thrown the file select dialog into chaos if it was included? Why make it so it is completely unintuitive for a computer user who has been using Windblows for years? Now a file select dialog with text entry and typeahead search on the files in that directory would be great default behaviour. (please don't tell me about the hotkey either - that is not intuitive)
Generally though I think Gnome 2.6 is pretty awesome. It is the best Linux DE I have ever used and I will continue to use it. It is definitely a step foward for the Linux Desktop.
" However KDE is cluttered and there is no central document that KDE developers can refer to in order to achieve proper usability. "
Let's be fair here. How many Gnome/GTK apps have their own File dialogs? Regardless or Gnome's HIG's, KDE's apps all tend to look and act like they were designed for one another. This is opposed to many of the marquee what I call "adopted" Gnome apps that don't integrate well with Gnome at all. Compare that with how Konq, Koffice, on Kontact work within KDE. KDE does in fact have more options, or what your calling "clutter" but overall its still more consistant then Gnome although that's finally started to change. Gnome also has the habit of making major interface changes between versions. Dialog boxes have been switched around and now the most fudemental way in which you interact with your OS ie file browsing has been turned on its head with Spatial. No warnings, no this is optional in 2.6 but will be switched on in 2.8 etc. KDE on the other hand has stayed consistant in the basic ways that matter for years now. The HIG's the Gnome devs go by are nice but they aren't some magic beans which have fixed all of Gnome's issues. Users from XP should try both and see what they like more, but I'll also say that IMHO KDE continues to be the more polished better managed project of the two.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
You'd probably get some nasty comments about gnome's speed if you gave them middle-aged computers.
Right now gnome's main usability problem is it's speed. That's the only reason I don't use it. I have a 900mhz Duron. Sure it's old but it runs wind32 and qt apps quickly-- quickly enough for most tasks. I hope gtk gets speed tweaks soon. (I've even heard people with recent CPUs saying gtk feels lethargic on their systems.)
I know the study was aimed at the layout of the desktop and such but let's face it responsiveness is a big part of a user's experience.
(On MacOS X, step 1 was the hardest, because there's either no console icon by default, or the store had removed it)
It doesn't matter what I'm trying to achieve, I always do this. Does anyone else do the same?
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
Currently, the HIG (see above) is made available to developers for voluntary adherence. If more resources were made availCurrently, the HIG (see above) is made available to developers for voluntary adherence. If more resources were made available, the GNOME project could start a certification program to document compliance with the standard. This would allow users to seek out certified applications and know that these applications would integrate well with their existing desktops.able, the GNOME project could start a certification program to document compliance with the standard. This would allow users to seek out certified applications and know that these applications would integrate well with their existing desktops.
Horrible idea. None of the good desktop interfaces out there have *ever* required certification. We know that it is not necessary to produce an easy-to-use desktop. Further, this will discriminate against those people that do not have money to pay certification fees, slow development of applications (as individual versions would have to each be certified), and slow evolution of the HIG itself. I am opposed, and think that any attempt to formalize a certification process as part of GNOME would simply lead to bad feelings, loss of good will for GNOME, and project fragmentation.
Unfortunately, those who were not were just as quickly lost and confused. To maintain the abstraction, we recommend that it be removed from the view of the new user and kept in the application menu.
There were a number of suggestions like these -- hiding advanced functionality. While this is a reasonable approach -- the terminal is still in the applications menu, and easily available and easily found by non-novice users -- it is also extremely important not to work too hard to hide functionality. One of the largest problems with GNOME 2.x (IMHO, of course) is that significant and valuable functionality has been hidden or deprecated in the name of more basic "easy to use" features. This includes two of my favorite pet peeves:
* Viewport support (someone apparently decided that it was "confusing" to allow the user to have a window partly on one viewport and partly on another, so it was replaced with a number of virtual desktops). As a result of this technical decision, sawfish (which is not the newbie-recomended GNOME WM in any event) underwent significant negative technical change.
* User-rebindable accelerators. In GNOME 1, unlike every other GUI that I know of, accelerator keys attached to menu items can be simply and easily rebound by highlighting a menu item and tapping the desired key combination. This is a phenomenally powerful feature that demonstrated that the OSS world really *does* enjoy new ideas and significantly improved the GNOME user experience. It meant, for the first time, that the user was not bound by the decisions of the application developer. KDE has a similar-but-not-identical feature that allows *some* menu item accelerators to be globally rebound (frankly, I'd like to see the synthesis of these two featurs). Anyway, some usability person decided that this could be confusing to a new user (fine, I'll buy that) and the solution presented was to entirely disable this feature and requires manually adding a line to a text file on a per-user basis, instead of simply providing a toggle button in an "Advanced..." dialog or something similar. As a result, few users know about or take advantage of this functionality.
A remedy is needed for this situation. The answer could be an installation application that can speak to all of the popular distributions. It could be built in such a modular way as to allow new backends and functionality.
This is a good idea, and should have been done a while ago. It's a bit disheartening to think that this will likely have a very limited subset of functionality and be used by most users, though.
A solution to this problem that allows for applications to be downloaded from webpages an
May we never see th
The recommendations don't follow from the user experience. Several don't necessarily follow, but I'll present the dominant problem here:
/etc/issues, and I edited it. It worked. I rebooted. It went away. It took me the longest time to figure out that an fucking script in /etc/rc.something/ was overwriting it. The information was stored in two places. I overwrote the wrong one, and boom. I was fucked. I stopped using Red Hat precisely because of the complex configuration scripts, which made the system fragile and ultimately, easy to break and difficult to use.
Maintain the Abstraction from the Underlying System
This is almost universally the wrong approach -- this is what Windows tries to do, and MacOS avoids. The key is to make the underlying system simple, and make the UI reflect that.
The problem with abstracting the two is that it leads to bit rot. At some point, the Windows registry will think a file is in one location, whereas the file is actually in another. Or the UI will misunderstand the way that the 5 options in the configuration file should be presented as 2 options in the UI. Or there will be some underlying binary configuration file, with some option that's not available in the GUI, that somehow gets flipped, breaking the whole system.
You very strongly don't want an abstraction. On the Mac, installing an application (I haven't use OSX, so my knowledge is based on the older versions) is as easy as dragging the folder onto the hard drive. To erase, you wipe it. On Windows, if you wipe an app like that, it'll leave bits and pieces of itself scattered throughout the registry, links in menus, DLLs in system folders, and dozens of other places. Worse, the uninstaller will often no longer work. Most clueless users, if they try to erase an application the wrong way, will end up with a semibroken system, since there are different levels of abstraction that do not maintain consistency.
The whole Windows (and increasingly, GNU/Linux) approach of abstracting out underlying complexity is flawed. The trick is to eliminate the underlying complexity, and have a single set of simple structures that the GUI tools (or the users manually) operate on.
When I first used Red Hat in '96, the types of issues that threw me were: I wanted to change the login text. I grepped for the old login text, found
This shows up a huge number of places -- especially in a heterogenous environment like GNU/Linux, you often have multiple configuration tools. I can download a half dozen Apache configuration tools. Very often, if you run one, then switch to another, the thing no longer works, since they edit different options in different ways.
One way to implement this (presented in an oversimplified fashion) is to first design what you want the UI to look like. Once you know, you design the underlying structure to match. This is the opposite of what most GNU/Linux and Windows developers do, where they try to engineer the most flexible underlying structure possible, and then develop a UI on top of that. This doesn't necessarily lead to less flexible underlying structures -- it's just that to have a good UI, you want to give some thought to the user experience when designing the engine, and especially, the configuration files.
most behaviors are easily modified there if you're as hardcore as you proclaim to be.
Where do I claim to be hardcore?
And if you don't like GNOME's design goals, then fine
Its not a matter of my own opinion - its a matter of our clients. I work for Red Hat in Australia and I can attest most of our clients don't like spatial mode. I'd like to have it either explained better (welcome to Gnome 2.6! We've included a new spatial mode! Its better for X reason! If you don't like it though, do Y!) or changed by default.
As one can imagine, my opinions are my own and don't necessarily represent my employers.
I'm beginning to get very frustrated by these usability studies because they all tend to make the same false assumption that "familiarity for new users" == "usability for all users."
This is simply NOT true. Usability is a complex quality, and it is the result of compromises among often conflicting goals such as discoverability of options, reduction of keystrokes/clicks for common tasks, customizability where common base cannot be established, compatibility with competing interfaces, humaneness of interface after long-usage, accessibility, internationalization, etc. etc. How quickly New Users can discover and perform tasks is only one dimension of the usability scale, and one that's not even all that important except in a setting like public access kiosks or Internet cafes.
Different OSes approach this problem differently, and where as Mac OS X has chosen to compromise all the goals with an emphasis on discoverability and tolerance after long usage, Windows has chosen to place a different emphasis on sacrificing flexibility for complex tasks in favor of making simple, repetitive tasks easy to accomplish. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages.
The traditional strength of the various Linux desktop systems has been flexibility and customizability, with less emphasis on the other issues. I'm not suggesting that the needs of new users whose primary OS is not Linux in settings like Kiosks and labs should not be taken into consideration, but it should not be the ONLY consideration.
Usability studies like this one emphasize the needs of new users with Linux as a secondary OS over everything else. Take this as an example:
These extra areas (the desktop-reveal button, the workspace switcher, the file manger icon, the terminal icon, and the running application button in the top right) could be removed by default...
This is the sort of recommendation that makes sense for kiosk machines (simplify the UI as much as possible and go for task-orientation), but it doesn't make sense for long-term usability. Removal of these features means that users will have to discover them and add them back in, and that plays into one of the weaknesses of the current Linux desktops: discoverability is relatively poor. This is a very shortsighted and pointless recommendation for a desktop system that is also meant to be used as a primary desktop system for many home users.
I wish usability studies would really think about what usability is, over all and long-term, rather than just "can new users in a hurry get an email written?"
My Acer aspire from 1995 had working voice recognition. Worked like a charm. I could say "Shut down...yes," and it would shut down. I could say "Switch to Descent" and it would start Descent. I could say "Switch to Chess" and it would start Descent. I could say "Switch to CHESS you stupid computer" and it would shut down.
It's sooo nice. Really. You can whip up a full web browser in about 5 minutes thanks to khtml.
Just FYI, KDE has UI Guidelines too: k de/style/basics/
* User interface design guidelines: http://developer.kde.org/documentation/design/ui/
* KDE Style Basics: http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/
"Good news, everyone!"