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Torvalds Says 'Use KDE'
An anonymous reader writes "Without tip-toeing around the matter, Linus Torvalds made his preference in the GNOME vs. KDE matter quite clear on the GNOME-usability list: "I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE. This 'users are idiots, and are confused by functionality' mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do. Please, just tell people to use KDE." Also, "Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'.""
Gnome developer Havoc Pennington's response points out that "reducing complexity" was not, in fact, the reason the particular dialog in question doesn't have all the options Linux wanted:
"Just for the record, since I made this decision I can tell you that 'might confuse people' was not the reason. More evidence for my point that 'might confuse people' is the reason made up by others, not the reason given by the decision makers."
Which is not to say that Linus is wrong (in the e-mail he writes that "If this was a one-off, I'd buy it. But I've heard it too damn many times. And only ever from Gnome.") -- I'm not a big fan of Gnome's lack of features (at least as compared to KDE), but it's not like anyone on Slashdot really conforms to the "average computer user" concept. And Linus surely doesn't either. Maybe Gnome is better for Mom and Grandpa. I'll stick with KDE, myself.
In 1998, I was a very active participant on the Gnome UI mailing list. In fact, the very first Gnome User Interface Guideline was in part based on my proposed one (google for "Rogue GNOME style guide" if you care about the details).
Two things shocked me back then, and from Linus comments it appears that neither of them have changed.
One is that Gnome has a ton of great contributors - and just as many who are not as great. Unfortunately, in areas where the matter is more discussion and consensus based and you can't prove your point by just coding it, the vocal trolls crowd out the valuable contributors.
Two is that within those who contributed the the UI discussion there was a surprising lack not only of experience in the HCI field (ok, I had just started out there myself) but also a strong resistance to pick up the vast literature available or trust in actual end-user studies.
The last was what caused me to quit. How can you design a user interface without talking to the users? You can't. Anyone working in HCI knows that. Assumptions == Disaster
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Ah, but see, what you're seeing on the Mac is actually elegant simplicity. There's power lurking there.
Sure the playlist selector in iTunes only has one button to add a new playlist, but hold down the Shift key while your mouse is in the playlist area and the button turns into an add new Smart playlist button. Or in the Browse area, click on the column header to Genre, Artist or Album and you zoom back to the top of the list.
These sort of rewards await those who explore. But for the faint of heart, the simple interface still functions.
>KDE installs all this useless crap that I don't want on my machine.
Most of these apps, (keyes,kteatime,amor etc) are in the package kdetoys, which you can safely remove from your installation.
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
Using "FUCKING IDIOT" in caps on a mailing list is fairly childish behaviour, I think. There is a reasoned debate to be had there with the devs (not to be confused with the GNOME fanboy users) - how to add the complex options given limited developer time and a desire to make things usable without significant mental energy. Just shouting and insulting the developers is not the right approach and somebody needs to tell Linus that.