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KDE Developers and Usability Folks on Cooperation
sultanoslack writes "Over at NewsForge a story just popped up on the usability experts from OpenUsability and some of the issues on working with KDE development teams, specifically the KDE PIM team. There's some interesting content on the different working styles of the two groups as well as a little bit on some of the improvements that were part of the recent KDE 3.4 release."
Before some people start jumping up and mention how great GNOME is and how clean everything is and that they have usability and whatever, better get a look a this screenshot.
As you can see, and I know GNOME people are highly interested to bash this article down to nirvana, you figure out that GNOME itself is far from perfect and needs some huge usability studies on their own.
So comparing KDE with Windows (as some GNOME people did above) will get you nowhere. Before ranting about other Environments start looking on your own shit first. Look at all the different Toolbar types. One with Icons, one with Text below Icons, then another one has drag handles, different sizes of Toolbars etc.
This is one of the best news I've heard in years.
The Raven
Each member has an "OpenUsability Peer Rating" (borrowed from Advogato) and a Skills Profile. Not every member takes advantage of this but it seems like a good framework.
Is it only me who finds that KDE Print just has too many icons, buttons and configuration options? Just take a look at this: http://printing.kde.org/screenshots/. Without intimately knowing the system/environment you are working at, it might be impossible to setup a printer. It happened to me once...and I am not that much of a newbie. Or is it that I am not that bright?
Here's what I did today. I went to CompUSA and bought a 160GB Ultra ATA Drive. I popped open my Mac G4 and installed it. Then I partitioned the drive and installed OSX. Next I installed Ubuntu. Awesome distro. First time I've ever installed Linux on any machine anywhere. First thing I noticed: the email setup was different from standard practices. Next thing I noticed: Open menus and screens left trails on the monitor. Third thing: Gimp locked and the usual keyboard combinations to force quite didn't work. What I'm trying to say is STANDARDIZE, STANDARDIZE, STANDARDIZE! Take a class in consumer behavior for once in your lives! The user experience in Linux doesn't have to match the Mac or Windows experience, but atleast go for some sort of intuitive commonality.
chmod 666 /dev/pilot would fix it
Qt programs are absolutely true C++ programs. If you don't want to use moc, you can write by hand all of the code that moc would generate for you.
Paul.
I spend some of my free time working on GNOME (obligatory link). I don't like KDE at all. Thus, I don't work on KDE. Even if I _did_ like KDE, I would refuse to work on a desktop environment based on a GPL/dual license toolkit. I like my freedom as in free and freedom as in beer. If I wanted to make proprietary software on GNOME without getting nailed by Trolltech, I can. There's no such freedom on KDE.
I'm not bugged by it, and I don't see a problem.
I still cannot see a single place that I can remove software that I install.
K menu --> System -- Package Manager
The task panel still not resizable using the mouse. And when you resize, the icons get larger (what good is that?)
Resizing the task bar is not something the average user does every day. Once in a great while is more like it. I have *never* tried to resize it with my mouse, simply because I never resize the taskbar. The taskbar in KDE has a dozen more customization options than in Windows, so use the Settings menu.
When install softwares, most of the times, I still have to find out where the heck it went to (which directory). Why don't they all make an entry in the menu like the M$ does.
There is a Filesystem Heirarchy Standard (FHS) that explains where all files on a compliant system belong. Not all software is 100% compliant, but then again it isn't on Windows, either. Check the Package Manager and it'll tell you where all the individual files are. Also, this isn't something that users should really concern themselves with. Let the system handle it.
There's so many other problems. For example, first click on the address bar of firefox in windows would highlight it, so I just type in new address. In Linux, that just put a cursor there.
You're right, and this should never change! You forget this is *NIX and not Windows. When you highlight something like that, it is copying it to the clipboard. If I highlight a URL in a different document and want to paste it into the Firefox URL window, under your system I'm hosed because clicking in the window highlighted the existing URL and blew away my clipboard.
I am not sure about the latest Linux version, but Mandrake 10.01, or RH E3, I can't find the tool bar for folders to go up, next, previous.
Uh, in the file manager? Konqueror in KDE, places those as the first three buttons...
In the early days, I heard Linux uses little memory, swap algorithm are good, but when I use it, boy, with little memory, it's slow to a crawl (when I ran Websphere on 256 M machine). With a very fast machine, it still takes along time to start up. And applications still take a long time to start up.
It depends on what you do. Systems can be tweaked to boot in a few seconds in many cases, and RAM depends on the eye candy. Application startup time varies, and KDE 3.4 is the fasted KDE yet. AbiWord (non-KDE) loads in 4 seconds on my 750 MHz P3 (first time) and reloads in under 3.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The screenshots do not show the default desktop, it show how this particular user has set up his desktop. So it merely shows that you can customize KDE to your exact liking. And I don't see how that is a "failing of open source".
FWIW, my KDE-desktop looks like this. Quite a difference, no?
Please: if you want to complain about KDE, do not use some heavily modified desktop as your basis of complaining! The desktop shown on the previous screenshots are NOT what KDE looks like by default! It merely shows what this particular user prefers.
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