Windows and Linux User Interfaces

Anonymous Coward writes "Greg Raiz, Boston based interface designer and former Microsftie takes a look at Linux and outlines key shortcomings and strengths of an OS that could take on a giant."

Comments

Oh so right...

[bod1988]

The Linux community needs to learn about standards, every fucking distribution has a different way of doing things. No wonder hardware companies don't release drivers, as soon as the kernel gets upraded, the driver no logner works. Ready for the desktop? Yeah right

Windoze Fonts

[twitter]

I guess I should have broadened the scope of my premise to include the general look and feel of OpenOffice .org. This is fact: This application looks better on Windows than on Linux. Now you tell me it does not.

OK, I'll tell you that it's been a long time since I've seen any desktop besides OSX look as good as Debian or Mepis default installs. Solaris and Windoze don't come close anymore. I don't know what you did in four hours of messing with config files or why you needed to, but the story is really the same on Windoze. I dare you to try to change menu fonts there. For more than a year now, default X configurations have been excellent. As Windoze performance declines over time, so does it's appearance, but X continues to look good.

When you combine good fonts in X with KDE menu and Enlightenment theme transparencies, you have the best looking desktop in the world. Mac OSX can match fonts and has nice GUI zooming and other tricks which rate about equal in utility, but given the choice between free and non free, why chose non free?

Windoze is an unmitigated dissaster. Any "real" graphics program there comes with it's own version of directX which might screw every other program you have. Beyond that, consistency between vendors and even between versions is non-existant. You might be able to go to the font fairy and get pretty looking fonts, but messing with your actual system fonts is liable to blow up more than it fixes. Systems that are simply run by normal people start off ugly and get uglier.